Moral Issues in Intelligence-led Policing

Helene Gundhus, Kira Rønn, Nick Fyfe, Helene Gundhus, Kira Rønn, Nick Fyfe, Helene Oppen Gundhus, Kira Vrist Rønn, Nick Fyfe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415373791
• eBook ISBN: 9781351864503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The core baseline of Intelligence-led Policing is the aim of increasing efficiency and quality of police work, with a focus on crime analysis and intelligence methods as tools for informed and objective decisions both when conducting targeted, specialized operations and when setting strategic priorities. This book critically addresses the proliferation of intelligence logics within policing from a wide array of scholarly perspectives. It considers questions such as:

• How are precautionary logics becoming increasingly central in the dominant policing strategies?
• What kind of challenges will this move entail?
• What does the criminalization of preparatory acts mean for previous distinctions between crime prevention and crime detection?
• What are the predominant rationales behind the proactive use of covert cohesive measures in order to prevent attacks on national security?
• How are new technological measures, increased private partnerships and international cooperation challenging the core nature of police services as the main providers of public safety and security?

This book offers new insights by exploring dilemmas, legal issues and questions raised by the use of new policing methods and the blurred and confrontational lines that can be observed between prevention, intelligence and investigation in police work.

Part I

The proliferation of intelligence-led policing

1 Police practices in the age of precaution

A moral typology

Vidar Halvorsen

Introduction

Risks and uncertainties are inherent in our everyday practices. Most of the time, however, they do not undermine the predictability and trust which make social life and social interactions possible. Many of our interactions with strangers unfold on the basis of our implicit acceptance of shared rules; others are non-intended, yet foreseen, aggregate outcomes of individual actions.

I can, for example, reasonably predict that most drivers will stop at a red traffic light, because I take for granted that they share, or at least take into account, a rule obligating them to do so under specific, legally stipulated circumstances. But I can also reasonably predict that when I drive downtown to work in the morning, I will end up in a traffic jam – a form of non-intended collective irrationality that is causally generated by the aggregate effects of thousands of individually rational decisions to do likewise. Although the first example is a case of prediction based on knowledge of rule-based behaviour and the second a case of prediction based on knowledge of mere social regularity, they are both examples of social background knowledge which creates relatively stable expectations.

Even so, we regularly take precautionary measures to cope with the risks and uncertainties that nevertheless emerge in late modern societies. ‘Don`t jog in Central Park after midnight’ is a simple and quite straightforward rule of thumb which tells us what to do (or not do) in order to avoid something bad (say, a mugging) that could happen, although it might not happen: we decide to err on the side of caution, in the absence of inductively based knowledge that would enable us to form stable expectations.

Such knowledge, however, is increasingly being established by specialised police units, as when systematic analysis of computer-based statistics makes it easier to identify hotspots: specific locations that are regularly more prone to disorder and crime than others. Indeed, long before the introduction of digital information technology in police organisations, knowledge of hotspots was the hallmark of officers working on the streets, and enabled police forces to rationally coordinate the deployment of scarce manpower resources with the needs of local communities.

Nevertheless, contingency remains a fundamental problem for contemporary policing. The aim of this chapter is to elaborate and defend a general framework that may help to identify moral ambiguities inherent in police activities characterised by attempts to come to grips with the challenge of contingency. It starts with a case which I have called a case of pre-emptive justice, and then sets out to explicate and systematise central concepts embedded in that case, and their normative implications for the varieties of knowledge-based police practices informed by what might be somewhat loosely called the logic of precaution.

A case of pre-emptive justice

In March 1996, a bag was found at Fornebu airport outside Oslo, the capital of Norway. In accordance with established procedures, the airport police examined the contents of the bag in order to identify the owner. It turned out that he was a Swedish citizen, who had presumably lost the bag on his return trip from Bodø, a town 760 miles north of Oslo. After a few days’ delay, the bag was sent back to the owner, who was living in Stockholm.

However, the Swede was not only the fortunate recipient of his lost property, he was also the unfortunate subject of a covert surveillance operation, including telephone tapping, carried out by the Swedish police at the request of the Norwegian police authorities. The grounds for police surveillance were related to the contents of the bag, most significant among which were maps and a notebook indicating that preparations had been made to rob a security van taking cash from a post office in Bodø. Before returning the bag to its owner, the local police in Bodø took photos and made copies of relevant materials and subsequently informed the private security company in charge of cash-in-transit what was likely to happen unless preventive counter-measures were taken. However, it was decided not to interfere directly with the preparations, in order to find out whether local accomplices were involved. A co-suspect from Stockholm, who had accompanied the owner of the bag on his reconnaissance expedition to Northern Norway, was also kept under constant surveillance and in June was observed, together with the main suspect, stealing number plates from two cars in Oslo. In August, both suspects were observed and videotaped while practising with their firearms at a rifle range in Stockholm.

At the beginning of September, the preparatory activities of the suspects seemed to coalesce into a concrete plan. Norwegian local police were informed by their Swedish colleagues that the suspects were on their way north by car, crossing the Norwegian border on 12 September. At this stage, local police were assisted by the surveillance squad of the Metropolitan police in Oslo, thus making possible a detailed and thorough observation of the suspects’ whereabouts. The comprehensive nature of the surveillance operation is reflected in the rich detail of the ensuing police reports, according to which, for example, the suspects were watched as they stole a Ford Mondeo¹ and a Volkswagen Golf. This meant that they now had three cars at their disposal, two of which were left at different locations in the following days, apparently to facilitate a smooth escape. The suspects slept in a tent. They were observed digging a hole in the ground, close to the highway east of Bodø, which was interpreted by the police as preparing a temporary hiding place for the proceeds of what was now assumed to be a crime in progress.

That this was a reasonable assumption was confirmed by subsequent events on the final day, Monday 16 September 1996. Early in the morning the suspects were watched as they were circling the post office in Bodø by car, assuring themselves that the security company’s van was parked outside, ready for departure. They drove further north on the highway, to make their final arrangements in a mountain area a few miles outside Bodø. When the security van finally appeared, it was pursued, and eventually overtaken, by the suspects, who, with a fake stop sign and flashing lights, signalled the van to halt.

The security van, however, did not stop; on the contrary, it suddenly rammed the suspects’ car, pushing it from the road and down a slope. As the suspects probably soon realised, the driver, although he was wearing the security company’s normal uniform, was not a normal employee; he was actually a member of the SWAT squad from the Metropolitan police in Oslo.² Moreover, he was not alone. Instead of cash, the van contained four other armed police officers from the squad, with orders to arrest the suspects as soon as the legal conditions for charging them with attempted robbery were satisfied. One suspect was arrested immediately, the other was shot and hit in his legs as he tried to escape.

In court, the defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charges brought against them.³ However, they did not seek to dispute the overwhelming evidential support for the district attorney`s contention that they had been acting on a meticulously worked-out plan to rob a security van, and that they had carried the plan through as far as they could. Instead, they provided an alternative explanation of the indisputable facts of the case, invoking the legal excuse of duress. When the missing bag reappeared after a few days` delay, they noticed – they claimed – that it had been searched. Therefore, from that time on, they took it for granted that the local police had been informed about the details of their plan. Normally, such an assumption would lead to the cancellation of an operation, but that option was not feasible in this case, they argued. They claimed that their local accomplices, who had provided the defendants with the necessary information about security routines and police technology and with whom they had agreed to share the proceeds, had warned them that unless they stuck to their side of the bargain, repressive measures would be taken against members of their families.

Not surprisingly, mainly due to the lack of the supplementary evidence that would have been needed to support the defendants` story and undermine the well-corroborated case for the prosecution,<sup>4</sup> their alternative account failed to make any substantial impact on the court, which eventually sentenced the two defendants to punishments that came close to what had been asked for by the prosecutor: two years’ imprisonment for one man, two years and three months’ imprisonment for the other. The verdict was not appealed by the defendants. Thus, even in the defendants` implausible version, this case provides an illustration of not merely pre-emptive but also ‘poetic justice’: two wrongdoers initiated a process in the course of which they were unexpectedly subjected to the very coercive threats that they originally set out to impose on others.

Although this incident occurred more than twenty years ago, in the relatively peaceful society of Norway, it provides an early hint of moral ambiguities inherent in the increasing demand for ‘actionable intelligence’ in contemporary policing (see too Chapters 2 and 4). For example, in the wake of the operation in 1996, the police were publicly criticised for not intervening at an earlier stage. Although they did not actively provoke the attempted robbery, and therefore the suspects could not claim the defence of entrapment, the police nevertheless allowed the crime to happen, despite the fact that extensive surveillance had provided sufficient legal grounds for arresting the suspects on the charges of car theft and the fraudulent fitting of stolen number plates. On the contrary, the SWAT squad officers were explicitly ordered to refrain from taking action against the suspects until the legal conditions for charging them with attempted robbery were satisfied. As a critical response to his choice of strategy, the police chief in charge of the operation was reported to the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) for ‘gross lack of judgement in the course of his duty’ by one of the suspects’ defence lawyers. The charge was eventually dismissed by the director general of public prosecution as unfounded, and the PCA, moreover, concluded that the intentional shooting of the fleeing felon was legally defensible. Nevertheless, the PCA concluded its report to the district attorney with some moderately critical remarks on the police chief’s decision not to interfere with the suspects’ preparations at an earlier stage:

This and another case show how differently the police can act in comparable situations. In the present case, attempted robbery was prevented by way of a major mobilization of armed police officers and the use of firearms which seriously wounded a person … . Another case … involves the apprehension of a Swedish citizen … who apparently also was planning a robbery in Norway. The police apprehended him before the attempt was carried out. As far as is known, [he] has been released and expelled from the country and the case against him has been dismissed. The question is then – which of these extremes constitutes, all things considered, the best method of enforcing the law in society?

(p. 4–5, translation from Norwegian by VH)

Pre-emptive, preventive and deceptive policing

In his classic work on the morality of warfare, Just and Unjust Wars (1977), Michael Walzer makes a distinction between pre-emptive and preventive war, the crucial difference being that the first, unlike the second, responds to an attack which is not merely possible, but imminent. According to this distinction, which is widely accepted in normative thinking about warfare, the Bush regime`s military invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an instance of preventive war, despite the fact that it was based on the (false) claim that the existence of weapons of mass destruction amounted to an imminent threat to the international community.

In many respects, the comparison between waging war and policing is grossly misleading, despite the frequent use of slogans like ‘the war against crime’. This is a normative point; descriptively, paramilitary strategies and tactics in crime-fighting and order maintenance are easily observable in, say, the aggressive stop-and-search procedures practised by the British police prior to the Brixton disorders in 1981 and the extensive sweeps of the LAPD preceding the Rodney King riots in May 1992. Similarly, the celebrated ‘Broken Windows’ strategy adopted by the NYPD in the 1990s turned out in the long run to have a significant counterproductive impact on ethnic minorities.⁵ The Afro-American experience of paramilitary policing in the US was aptly conveyed by the title of Jerome Miller’s book, Search and Destroy (1996), and has more recently been convincingly documented by Radley Balko in his book on the militarisation of American policing in Rise of the Warrior Cop (2014) (see too Chapter 12).

Nevertheless, Walzer`s distinction clearly has a bearing on strategic and tactical thinking by the police in the Norwegian case of pre-emptive justice, which also exemplifies how surveillance, deception and pre-emption can be combined in a morally controversial way.

We can sharpen the analysis of the Norwegian case by applying a typology of police actions presented by the sociologist Gary Marx in his now classic book on police surveillance in America, Undercover (1988: 11–12). The typology emerges as the result of taking into consideration two dimensions of police work: whether it is overt or covert and whether it is non-deceptive or deceptive (see too Chapter 5). The cross-tabulation of these dimensions generates the following table, containing four cells for four different types of police activity.

According to the perspective elaborated by Michel Foucault in various works, particularly in his book on the birth of the prison, Discipline and Punish (1977), all kinds of state surveillance activities – including uniformed police patrols by car or on foot (cell a in Marx’s table), as well as covert, yet passive observations of citizens in public places by plain-clothes officers (cell c) – are inherently coercive by virtue of being connected to a variety of knowledge-based power and discipline practices of state and non-state institutions. As Anthony Giddens (1985: 14) has observed, the term ‘surveillance’ refers not only to the gathering and storage of information about individuals but also to ‘the direct supervision of the activities of some individuals by others in positions of authority over them’.

Table 1.1 Marx’s typology of police actions

Are police actions:
		Overt?	Covert?
Does police action involve:	Non-deception?	a) Uniformed patrol	b) Passive surveillance
	Deception?	c) Trickery by persons whose identity is known	d) Undercover

However, a general position such as Foucault`s will probably readily acknowledge the extent to which the practice of police surveillance in Giddens’s two senses of the term may also serve to enhance, as well as res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: The proliferation of intelligence-led policing
• PART II: New logics – new measures?
• PART III: Innovations and new technologies
• PART IV: Outsourcing police work
• PART V: Joining forces
• PART VI: Old crimes, new ways
• Index