The author argues that assessments of organized crime that are intended to be a basis for law enforcement strategic planning and policy development must be grounded in a clear and empirically based conceptual framework. In developing this argument, the paper examines two approaches for assessing organized crime: the "organized crime potential" assessment of the German police agency Bundeskriminalamt (2002) and the "risk-based methodology" developed by the Ghent University's Crime Research Group. The author concludes that the weaknesses of these two approaches apparently stem from the fundamental difficulties of measuring a phenomenon as elusive as "organized crime." The paper concludes that the study of organized crime should focus on developing a conceptual and theoretical framework that guides the measurement of "organized crime" in a useful way, even if such a framework portrays complex and multifaceted phenomena; however, so long as there is no such conceptual and theoretical framework for a meaningful measurement of "organized crime" on a grand scale, methodologies of assessment should be designed to assess the nature, extent, and social relevance of more concrete phenomena. The improvements proposed in this paper focus on criminal networks as key empirical references and on a typology that distinguishes criminal networks by differences in their social embeddedness. 71 references