Intelligence-Led Policing

Jerry H. Ratcliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317510390
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is intelligence-led policing? Who came up with the idea? Where did it come from? How does it relate to other policing paradigms? What distinguishes an intelligence-led approach to crime reduction? How is it designed to have an impact on crime? Does it prevent crime? These are just a few of the questions that this book seeks to answer.

This revised and updated second edition includes new case studies and viewpoints, a revised crime funnel based on new data, and a new chapter examining the expanding role of technology and big data in intelligence-led policing. Most importantly, the author builds upon an updated definition of intelligence-led policing as it has evolved into a framework capable of encompassing more operational police activity than simply organized crime and recidivist offenders.

Topics covered in this book include:

• The origins and aims of intelligence-led policing

• A comparison of intelligence-led policing with other conceptual models of policing

• An exploration of analysis concepts and the role of analysis in target-selection

• Evaluations of intelligence-led policing as a crime-control strategy

Written by an expert in the field, this book offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to intelligence-led policing for students, practitioners and scholars of policing, criminal intelligence and crime analysis. This book will be of particular interest to professionals within the law enforcement environment; senior officers, middle management, analysts and operational staff. A companion website offers a range of resources for students and instructors, including slides, chapter headings with supporting notes, key terms and names, critical-thinking questions, and quizzes.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

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What is intelligence-led policing? Where did it come from? How does it relate to other policing ideas, and what distinguishes an intelligence-led approach to crime reduction? How should it have an impact on crime? Does it reduce crime? What is crime disruption? Is intelligence-led policing just for the police? These are questions asked by many police professionals, including senior officers, analysts and front-line staff. Similar questions are also posed by students of policing who have witnessed the emergence of intelligence-led policing from its British origins to worldwide movement. These questions are also relevant to crime prevention practitioners and policymakers seeking long-term crime benefits. The answers to these questions are the subject of this book.

Questions about how the police should respond to crime have plagued scholars and practitioners of policing for decades. When the first officers of a modern police service walked out onto London’s streets in September 1829, one of their first commissioners stressed that the primary role of the police was the prevention of crime (Mayne 1829). At first, the job of the police officer remained – at least until the 1960s – a relatively simple one. In these halcyon days, the patrolling officer had to avoid getting into trouble with the sergeant, and then take care of two constituent groups: local offenders and potential victims. His (all early police officers were male) job was to inhibit the former and reassure the latter (Flood 2004).

The police officer was the epitome of the Hobbesian ideal, the thin blue line that represented societal order and governmental legitimacy in the face of crime and anarchy (Wood and Shearing 2007). However, since the 1960s, many aspects of the policing world have changed. Society transformed rapidly, civil rights upheaval struck the US, criminals developed new ways to commit crime, public expectations changed, and the police were forced to adapt.

Radio-directed rapid response, criminal investigations and crime fighting became the dominant model of law enforcement. The job of a police chief became one of managing risk, trying to keep the public happy, and responding instantly to crime threats once they emerged. Crime fighting and making arrests came to define the role of the police, while crime prevention was relegated to an occasional hobby. To put this gulf in perspective, one UK survey found that while 40 per cent of personnel were assigned to investigation, only 1 per cent addressed crime prevention (Audit Commission 1993: 14).

Reactive, investigative policing became the order of the day and, at least in the US, this is still the dominant model of policing (Weisburd and Eck 2004). This strategy assumes that more detections will reduce the number of offenders and act as a deterrent to the criminals still at large; thus having a preventative role. It seems a simple argument: increased crime detection will lead to increased crime prevention, and therefore increasing the number of arrests will prevent crime. The police do not, however, arrest at a rate even close to making this a reality. If police were to increase arrests, we would need more courts and jails, more probation staff and more parole boards. Prisons would need to be larger and the police would need more staff.

Durlauf and Nagin (2011) have cogently argued that spending more on the police and their deterrence role makes more sense than spending on prisons, but few seem to be listening. Irrespective of the almost perpetual law and order debate that sees politicians and the media regularly exploit public fears (Weatherburn 2004), recent trends during the 2008–2012 global recession suggest that taxpayers are unwilling to fund the greater numbers of police that are necessary to reduce crime either through prevention or through an increase in incarceration. From 1960 to 1990 police strength in England and Wales increased by 75 per cent but recorded indictable offences increased by 500 per cent; 1990 also saw the US gap between police staffing and the crime rate open to more than 200 per cent, a difference that has only recently narrowed. Some leaders in policing have identified that the traditional role of reactive, investigative enforcement is not a satisfactory response to this new, more complex world. They began to recognise the truth of one common saying within law enforcement that ‘you can’t arrest your way out of a problem’. If not, then what options remain?

Reimagining policing

The first attempt to ‘reimagine policing’ (Wood and Shearing 2007) took law enforcement back to a mythical age of cheerful beat cops chatting with store owners and clipping misbehaving kids around the ear. Community policing initially appeared to hold the promise of reconnecting the police with the public, and from this would flow greater information about crime problems, a re-engagement of neighbourhood issues by police, and an improvement in police legitimacy. In the US, the breakdown in the relationship between many communities and the police in the 1960s and 1970s drove American law enforcement agencies to embrace the community policing ethos to a huge extent, and by the 1980s, police agencies in the UK and beyond were claiming to be committed to community policing (Morgan and Newburn 1997).

The primary aim of community policing is a restoration of police legitimacy; however – and notwithstanding any other benefits – the research evidence suggests that agencies that have moved to a general community policing ethos have not been successful in translating that strategy into meaningful crime reduction (Sherman et al. 1998; Gill et al. 2014). Since then, police chiefs, while retaining the rhetoric of community policing, have been exploring different managerial approaches. New strategies have been made possible through a broad movement in policing that has discovered the benefit – and necessity – of using data to inform decisions and drive crime control strategy. This movement has spurred the development of problem-oriented policing, CompStat, predictive policing and intelligence-led policing.

Problem-oriented policing recommends that departments identify clusters of repeat incidents and use these as indications of underlying problems within the community (see www.popcenter.org). Police – armed with the results of a thorough analysis of the crime problem – target the specific cause of the issue, sometimes (though not always) with the help of the community both to identify problems and figure out solutions (Goldstein 1990; Leigh, Read and Tilley 1996). Problem-oriented policing has been instrumental in directing a generation of police leaders to the importance of analysis as a foundation for decision-making (see Chapter 4).

Originating in the New York City Police Department in early 1994, CompStat is an accountability process that aims to empower mid-level commanders to seek a rapid response to emerging crime problems and hot spots. The central medium is a meeting where recent crime data are mapped, viewed and discussed by police commanders. After a much-publicised drop in crime in New York City, interest in CompStat spread around the world (again, see Chapter 4).

There is a natural transition from the rapid response philosophy of CompStat to predictive policing, one of the most recent buzzwords in law enforcement. More of a tactical approach to street crime than an organisational philosophy, predictive policing has been defined as ‘the application of analytical techniques… to identify likely targets for police intervention and prevent crime or solve past crimes by making statistical predictions’ (Perry et al. 2013: xiii). The desire to use technology to predict places for police to pay attention is clearly influenced by the needs of CompStat, but is also tied to the broader data-driven movement that has swept policing (more on predictive policing in Chapter 9).

Since inception in the early 1990s, intelligence-led policing has become one of the most enduring approaches to crime control in the police lexicon: ‘intelligence-led policing does not re-imagine the police role so much as it re-imagines how the police can be “smarter” in the exercise of their unique authority and capacities’ (Wood and Shearing 2007: 55). Intelligence-led policing has a lineage that can be traced back to many of the same key drivers that influenced the development of problem-oriented policing and CompStat. Originally formulated as a law enforcement operational strategy that emphasised the use of criminal intelligence when planning police tactics, intelligence-led policing has evolved into a management model and data-driven movement.

Intelligence-led policing holds out the promise of a more objective basis for deciding priorities and resource allocation. The hope is that police command staff will be ‘strategic, future oriented and targeted’ in their approach to crime control. Maguire argues these are more than just catchy phrases; they are representative of a significant and widespread change in the business of policing (Maguire 2000: 315–317). This is, however, a change that has been resisted by some police commanders. For example, James documented the difficulty of changing one British county police force from an operations-led model to one that was more intelligence-led (James 2011).

Notwithstanding myriad challenges, intelligence-led policing had become a significant movement in policing by the beginning of this century. Canada’s RCMP adopted intelligence-led policing in 2000 (Deukmedjian and de Lint 2007); less than two years later the New Zealand Police were committed to intelligence-based policing (NZP 2002); in the US, a 2002 summit of over 120 criminal intelligence experts called for a national policing plan to promote intelligence-led policing (IACP 2002); by 2003 every police service in Australia, including the Australian Crime Commission, had reference to intelligence-led policing on their websites (Ratcliffe 2003); and in the UK, the concept was enshrined in legislation that demanded all forces adopt the National Intelligence Model by April 2004.

Intelligence-led policing emerged at a time when crime threats had become less parochial. Organised crime groups now dominate the illegal arms, drug and people smuggling industries and provide significant challenges to containment, not to mention suppression. After all, ‘Locally based policing … is not structured to combat transnational and global-scale criminality’ (Harfield 2000: 109–110).

And international organised crime is not the only significant new challenge to policing. Since 11 September 2001, the task of terrorism prevention has challenged all aspects of the criminal justice system, creating a post-9/11 homeland security era where the focus continually threatens to shift away from the everyday crime to which communities remain perpetually subjected. The growth of regional information-sharing partnerships and the development of fusion centres in the US has held out the promise of meaningful data sharing, with real-time intelligence linkages expected to play a key role in preventing future terrorist incidents, though it is debatable whether this promise has yet been truly realised (Chermak et al. 2013; Ratcliffe and Walden 2010). These intelligence linkages rely on agencies sharing information among themselves, yet a key shortcoming recognised by the 9/11 Commission was the failure of agencies to do precisely this. They identified not only technological barriers to information sharing, but, perhaps more importantly, organisational and cultural obstacles.

There are no punishments for not sharing information. Agencies uphold a ‘need-to-know’ culture of information protection rather than promoting a ‘need-to-share’ culture of integration.

(9/11 Commission 2004: 417)

The 9/11 Commission could easily have been discussing the wider field of criminal intelligence and the way that many police departments currently handle information. The challenges for information sharing, vital to any data-driven, strategic, intelligence-led crime control strategy, are therefore substantial. And intelligence-led policing is not just about better information sharing or information collection: it is also about better resource allocation, priorities and crime reduction decisions.

Law enforcement is being asked to tackle a range of threats and risks that were never an issue when the current crop of police leaders entered public service. These managers are having to adapt rapidly to the new policing environment and are doing so with various levels of enthusiasm and success. It remains a challenging time to be in policing.

What is intelligence-led policing?

When first proposed, intelligence-led policing was an operational tactic that would reduce crime through proactive policing targeted by criminal intelligence, forged from a desire to see a more ‘businesslike’ approach to fighting crime (James 2003). Kent Police (UK), under the leadership of Sir David Phillips, moved resources from reactive, crime investigation departments to proactive units, began tactical operations that were directed by criminal intelligence analysis, and promoted greater intelligence gathering. Kent Police were among the first to practice ‘genuine’ intelligence-led policing force-wide (John and Maguire 2003). This information-based strategy focused heavily on active and prolific offenders.

Some began to see that the business model required to manage crime analysis and criminal intelligence would also work as a broader management model for policing in general (Flood and Gaspar 2009). From these early UK developments in intelligence-led policing grew the National Intelligence Model, which evolved into a business and management model for resource decisions affecting a wide range of police activities. The interpretation of intelligence-led policing appears to be broadening in scope, and has evolved into a management philosophy that places greater emphasis on information sharing and collaborative, strategic solutions to policing problems at the local and regional level.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book, intelligence-led policing continues to evolve into a framework capable of encompassing more operational police activity than simply organised crime and recidivist offenders. That being said, the paradigm of intelligence-led policing is being interpreted differently in some places with a subsequent ‘watering down’ of some of the original principles or worse – adoption of the strategy in name only. While there is certainly a lineage that can be traced, a single unifying definition may prove elusive under these circumstances. In case the reader is seeking a quick answer, I will endeavour in this book to argue that: intelligence-led policing emphasises analysis and intelligence as pivotal to an objective, decision-making framework that prioritises crime hot spots, repeat victims, prolific offenders and criminal groups. It facilitates crime and harm reduction, disruption and prevention through strategic and tactical management, deployment, and enforcement.

This definition (explained in greater depth in Chapter 4) recognises the evolution from whack-a-mole policing that arrests offenders with no overarching strategy, to one that places significant emphasis on data and intelligence analysis as a central component of police strategic thinking.

This requires a wider interpretation of the information resources that police can draw upon. In this book, ‘crime intelligence’ is used as a term to describe the result of the analysis of not only covert information from surveillance, offender interviews and confidential human sources (informants), but also crime patterns and other police data sources as well as socio-demographic and non-police information. It centralises the role of analysis at the core of police data-driven decision-making.

What makes intelligence-led policing unique?

The next chapters go into greater depth in attempting to clarify what intelligence-led policing is, and how it compares with other crime-control strategies; however, at this point it is useful to state what it is not. This book is about intelligence-led policing. It is not about intelligence-led police. The police are a specific social institution whereas ‘policing’ is a term that suggests a set of processes within society that fulfil specific social functions (Reiner 2010). As such, it is theoretically possible to conduct intelligence-led policing without involving the traditional public police force. Policing is now being widely offered by institutions other than the state, including private companies and community volunteers (Bayley and Shearing 1996). To understand the role of analysis in this expanding security field, it may be necessary to pay as m...