From the mid-1970s onwards, I became acquainted with the criminal justice world in the Netherlands through research, teaching and conferences. I conducted research in Amsterdam in the period 1974-80 (Punch, 1979a, 1985), taught Dutch police officers until the mid-1980s and later became involved in projects with the police in Utrecht and Amsterdam. In 1995 I helped to write Toekomst Gezocht for the Dutch Police Foundation for Society and Safety (SMVP, 1995) which was published in translation as Searching for a Future (Punch et al, 1998); the Dutch Police had just been through a major reorganisation, there was something of a loss of direction and this work presented a perspective for policing in the future. More recently, I have concentrated on developments in policing in the UK and the US. Two years ago, I received an assignment from the Police Research Programme (Programma Politie en Wetenschap, which is funded by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior in The Hague) on the ‘transfer’ of zero tolerance policing from abroad. This volume is based on the Dutch report for that project, Punch (2006a) Van ‘Alles Mag’ Naar ‘Zero Tolerance’: Policy Transfer en de Nederlandse Politie (Apeldoorn: Programma Politie en Wetenschap/Police Research Programme), and quotations are from the unpublished English version, Punch (2006b) entitled From ‘Anything Goes’ to ‘Zero Tolerance’: Policy Transfer and the Dutch Police. The director of the programme has kindly allowed me to incorporate parts of that English text into this work. The full English report is available from me (punch@xs4all.nl), and the Dutch version from www.politieenwetenschap.nl.