The police have become the go-to organization for many issues related to – or reaching far beyond – public order maintenance and crime fighting. Policing, however, is not necessarily limited to the involvement of governmental actors. Particularly for complex phenomena such as dirty crime, a broader governance framework applies. Similar to the police organization, this governance framework is affected by forces on macro, meso and micro level, or as Greene puts it, by tides, currents, eddies, whirlpools and riptides of modern policing. In this article, we discuss two cases of dirty crime (money laundering and illegal e-waste trade) and analyze the policing challenges and opportunities they present, reflecting on the metaphor of the sea.