Two months earlier Europol busted what it described as an "international organised crime network" that specialised in importing precursor chemicals from China into Europe.
Al-Nimr had long been a critic of the Saudi government, jailed on a number of occasions previously for his involvement in protests, and was found guilty by the country's Specialised Criminal Court in 2014 of crimes including calling for the collapse of the state and failing to pledge allegiance to the government.
By the time of the next election Osborne's announcements for police budgets could well spell fewer forces with fewer buildings with fewer officers, but staffed with more highly specialised officers tackling much more complex crime.
A specialised police department, ominously called the Crimes Against The State Unit, had threatened to arrest the country's highly respected finance minister just days after he returned from a trip to try to drum up international investment.
One idea is to create a specialised corps of judges for drug and organised-crime cases; a bolder one is to make these judges "faceless", protected by carefully guarded anonymity from the risk, and fear, of revenge.
The US Attorney's Office, part of the federal Department of Justice, recently said it will create a specialised unit in the city to deal with violent crime.
Those sorts of crimes required ever more dispersed networks, with specialised skills replacing sheer muscle.
He says: "The target for the economic crime module is all managers, not simply those with a specialised interest in economic crime or fraud like, for example, accountants.
Furthermore, offenders have been shown to be versatile in the types of crime they commit (Roach & Pease, 2014), and indeed police may overestimate the specialised nature of offending.
