Examining Intelligence-Led Policing

Developments in Research, Policy and Practice

A. James

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137307378
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a critical analysis of the employment of intelligence-led policing (ILP) strategies. It aims to convey a better understanding of some of the realities of the police investigative and criminal intelligence worlds, and to examine what the story of intelligence-led policing tells us about policing and the police organization.

1

Setting the Contemporary Policing Scene

Introduction

Since its emergence in Britain as a discrete policing strategy, ILP has been advanced as a panacea for the most pressing of policing’s ills; the police’s seeming inability to meet the ordinary expectations of their staff, their communities and their political masters. ILP strategies have been adopted across the developed world. Wrapped in the rhetorics of crime-fighting, reflexivity, and capacity-building, they usually have been presented as innovative and cost-effective solutions to society’s problems. Overwhelmingly and unapologetically realist in nature, they demonstrate that the police take crime seriously and are ready and willing to take decisive action when needed.

In Britain, ILP seems to have reached its apotheosis with the National Intelligence Model (NIM). The NIM’s authors wanted it to revolutionize intelligence work in policing in England and Wales, and to underpin a new ‘single service’, intelligence-led approach in mainstream policing. In this book, I explain the emergence of the model and examine its real influence on policing. I also explore what the NIM narrative reveals about ILP and the police organization. In this opening chapter, I set the scene for that analysis by assessing material that readers need to know to appreciate the contribution that this book makes to the canon of ILP research. The subjects addressed include: police intelligence work; the police organization; oversight of the police, policing, public policymaking and of course ILP.

Intelligence-led policing

The true meaning of the term ILP has never really been settled. In Britain, it is confusingly applied to a variety of ‘crime-fighting’ processes that rely on the efforts of analysts and intelligence specialists engaged in crime mapping, crime pattern analysis, data analysis and other problem solving approaches. There is another dimension to ILP which also relies on analysts and other specialists but in that case the emphasis is on the targeting of groups or individuals using covert methods; with their arrest, or some other intervention to prevent further offending, the intended outcome. Beyond those approaches, other novel strategies also have come to the fore. They are worthy of examination because each has challenged the traditional reactive policing paradigm and each patently influenced the NIM.

ILP in the modern era

Arguably, it was the introduction of Unit Beat Policing (UBP) in 1967 that provided the foundation for ILP in the modern era.¹ The specialization of patrol that accompanied UBP, established the local intelligence system in mainstream policing on which the modern intelligence structure is based. The introduction of the collator, an individual tasked with collecting and evaluating information collected by patrol officers was a significant milestone in the development of ILP and the specialization of the police workforce.

Commonly, the development of ILP is linked to concerns about: organized crime; the search for ‘best evidence’: the discrediting of investigative strategies that relied on suspects’ confessions; and the availability of increasingly sophisticated surveillance and information technologies. Chan’s (2003) suggestion that ILP’s appeal is that it promises new, problem solving ways of dealing with increasingly sophisticated and prolific offenders and Reiner’s (2010) argument that it allows the police to claim solutions to the problems associated with reactive policing strategies, certainly accord with my experience.

The explicit support of Britain’s Audit Commission (1993) for ILP signalled a significant shift in policing discourse. However, the reader will see that what the Commission lauded as ground-breaking, simply restated strategies used by police commanders at least 60 years earlier (many of which re-emerged at regular intervals thereafter). That highlights, at a very early stage, one of my key messages. That is, not only is there little that is truly new in policing but also that the police service lacks an institutional memory that is worthy of the name.

There is scepticism about whether ILP represents a fundamental transformation of policing or something simply bolted on to existing structures. Enthusiasm for it has been greater amongst academics and public than policymakers and police commanders for whom ‘the political risks involved are considerable’, particularly when efforts to change the police often ‘fall far short or fail’ (Skogan, 2008, p.23). Reiner argued that there are sufficient, well-researched examples of innovative policing strategies to suggest that targeted policing can succeed in having a ‘significant, if modest’ effect on crime and fear of crime (2000, p.217). However, the appeal of ILP to commanders has always been limited; the police elite’s innate orthodoxy has meant that it has had much less impact in the mainstream than rhetoric suggests.

Problem-oriented policing (POP)

POP was another of the proactive approaches putatively embraced by the British police service in this period. Goldstein (1979) popularly is credited with originating the style known as POP in the USA and his ideas spread across the developed world. Nobody has influenced policing more in that context. POP examples can be found across the USA, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and in many other nations.

Goldstein (1979) argued that a continuing emphasis on improving the police organization (evident in policing across the Western world at that time) was unlikely to raise the standard of service delivered to communities. Instead, police should aim to reduce the volume of problems that came to their attention to a manageable level by embracing a commitment to more systematic processes of inquiry. That would mean defining problems more specifically, collecting information more widely and engaging in a broader search for solutions. Those ideas also were central to the NIM.

In Britain, POP has usually been enacted through a standardized toolset utilizing analysis and environmental scanning. British analysts have favoured the SARA method, a sequential process involving in turn: (environmental) Scanning, (intelligence) Analysis, Response and Assessment (evaluation of the appropriateness of the response). Although Tilley (2003) has suggested that in practice, the process is much less structured with a great deal more overlap than the construct suggests.

POP requires that police take the initiative in addressing and in forging robust partnerships with communities. Goldstein (1979) thought this would be welcomed by the police establishment. However, he underestimated the resistance of the police rank-and-file to challenge the prevailing value system. Cope (2003) found that POP was not universally welcomed. Cultural resistance often led to the misuse or exclusion of analysis from operational responses. In Britain, POP is seen as ‘soft’ policing and though almost every force purports to engage in it, it is not, and never has been, a popular career choice for action-oriented patrol officers and detectives.

Community policing

In Britain, the first authoritative call for a system of policing more finely tuned to citizens’ needs was made in 1977 by John Alderson, chief of the Devon and Cornwall force (1973–82). Others such as Kenneth Newman, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (1982–87) (hereinafter, the Met) were keen to take up Alderson’s challenge. Community policing strategies are now commonplace in Britain and many of the multi-agency problem solving approaches they have spawned are consistent with the proactive, preventative, policing that Newman (and others who succeeded him) championed. However in the 1970s, Alderson’s views contrasted sharply with the majority, authoritarian, and orthodox, view in British policing expressed for example by James Anderton, chief of Greater Manchester Police (1976–91) who argued forcefully and consistently for the maintenance of the crime control status quo.

Community policing has been linked to crime reduction initiatives, often in partnership with communities. In Britain, the first formal partnerships emerged from the Scarman Inquiry into the Brixton riots (Scarman, 1981). Their further development was encouraged in a variety of Home Office circulars and consultation papers. There is widespread agreement that the most significant development in that context was the publication of the Morgan Report (Home Office, 1991). Morgan proposed that, with wide-ranging powers over education, housing and planning, local authorities should play a fuller part in crime prevention.

Partnership was boosted by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (CDA), which placed a statutory duty on chief officers and local authorities to work together to formulate crime reduction strategies. The identification by Innes (2004) of ‘signal crimes’; incidents that act as warnings about threats to people’s security, that may disproportionately impact the way they think, feel or act, added to that debate. Community-focused strategies evolved into the neighbourhood policing programme that operates across Britain today. Tilley (2008) has argued that the programme merges the key elements of POP and ILP. However, the introduction of two major change programmes contemporaneously has resulted in confusion and muddle. Certainly, attempts to integrate the two have not worked out as positively as some would have us believe.

Using intelligence

Compared to the subject of policing in general, investigative and intelligence policies and practices have received surprisingly little attention. Intelligence has always been core business for the armed forces and for the security services, and there is an extensive literature on intelligence and information work in those contexts. However, even though intelligence has been central to the activities of many specialist police units in Britain for 130 years, it is only relatively recently with the emergence of the NIM that meaningful efforts have been made to exploit intelligence opportunities in the mainstream.

Police intelligence

Until the last decade of the twentieth century, intelligence was rarely used to inform investigative strategy in mainstream policing. Important for its application to the discovery of evidence, criminal intelligence largely did not merit much attention as a discipline in its own right. Nor was it a subject that exercised commanders in the mainstream (Flood, 2003). Whilst an intelligence architecture supporting the higher policing function was well established at the end of the twentieth century, intelligence work of the kind needed to support ILP largely was ignored.

There are a number of reasons for that. Albeit, sections of the police service utilized intelligence, often to underpin the delivery of covert policing strategies, intelligence work as most people would understand it, was never really valued in the mainstream. In my experience, knowledge of intelligence gathering techniques (usually gathering only; few meaningful efforts were put into anything other than the most rudimentary of analysis of the collected data) was passed down from generation to generation within discrete units as a form of oral history. The tools and techniques used by those units were jealously guarded; often hidden behind the impenetrable curtain of ‘need to know’ which, historically, invariably outweighed the ‘dare to share’.

The seeming inability of the police service to use its intelligence effectively enough to underpin its protective services (as revealed for example by the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman) or to properly direct its operational activities, has been highlighted both in the media and by scholarly research. Tragic events such as the Soham murders had the effect of bringing the failings of police intelligence work into public view. In the same period, the Labour Government’s explicit commitment to human rights was given force by royal assent of the Human Rights Act, 1998 and then the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000 (RIPA). The latter, in particular, obliged the police service to completely overhaul its intelligence-gathering processes in response to the new challenges of RIPA compliance; in the process, bringing much greater transparency and accountability to those activities.

Flood (a senior officer in Kent in the 1990s and a significant figure in the story of ILP) argued that the ILP that emerged in Kent in that period (and that ultimately led to the creation of the NIM), was expected to revolutionize operational policing in the mainstream (2003). In the same period, Grieve (formerly a senior member of the Met and a leading British authority on criminal intelligence) developed an enhanced intelligence system for the Met, a project known as Systems for Investigation and Detection (The SID project), with which the NIM shares many features. Grieve suggested those developments signalled a new way of thinking about police intelligence in Britain, which needed ‘to be reclaimed from the secret world, made less threatening to communities and used in their service’ (2004, p.26).

Intelligence work and the NIM

The NIM has been subject only to limited review. Tilley (2008), Savage (2007), and Oakensen et al (2002) investigated the model in the context of policing policy. The particular focus of Kleiven’s research (2005) was the extent to which the NIM influenced intelligence gathering in communities (considered by some in the police to be an essential precursor to the creation of policing plans); she found that the model’s impact was negligible.

Collier (2006) and John and Maguire (2004) carried out empirical research into the NIM. The former found that there was tension at the local level ‘between the resources allocated to volume crime and serious crime, and between response-led, intelligence-led and reassurance-led strategies’. That is an issue that has come up again and again in modern times and it is one I will explore later.

Collier (2006, p.115) also found that NIM processes were implemented partially and ineffectively because of: technological problems; ‘the bureaucratization of processes’; and ‘cultural resistance’. He highlighted an ‘absence of rigorous evidence linking actions, results and contextual issues’ in the police areas he visited. John and Maguire (2004) uncovered those same failings in the forces they investigated. Ultimately, their research led them to conclude that significant improvements were needed if the model was to achieve its purpose.

Collier described the NIM’s tasking process (by which scarce resources would be allocated to the most pressing problems), which was central to the model, as having the potential to be relevant and influential because it could provide a framework to counter the police’s tendency to put a disproportional emphasis on ‘acquiring rather than retaining and utilizing knowledge’ (2006, p.115). However, the reader will see that potential has not been realized.

Institutional memory

More broadly, intelligence work is linked to issues of knowledge management and organizational memory. Earlier, I alluded to the fact that the need to ‘rediscover’ ILP in the 1990s, pointed to a defective and partial institutional memory but also to the over-zealous guarding of craft secrets by sections of the service. Whilst there are rather obvious reasons for limiting access to secrets, the net result has been to restrict the ability of officers outside those coteries to identify best practice or ‘what works’ or to use that knowledge productively to improve their professional practice.

Knowledge management has been described as ‘the process of creating, capturing and using knowledge to enhance organizational performance’ (Collier, 2006, p.109). Ratcliffe argued that knowledge ‘given context and meaning by the addition of organizational wisdom’, is immensely valuable to any organization (2008, p.98). He recommended that knowledge management should be an ‘intensive activity’ for policing in intelligence-led environments. My own experience as an intelligence manager taught me that few in mainstream policing followed that advice. In great part, that was because those being asked to implement ILP were ignorant of the intelligence craft.

The supporters of the NIM thought it would provide the foundation of ‘doctrine; for policing in the new millennium’ (Flood, 2003). However, the proliferation of doctrine it signalled has not been universally welcomed. In 2010, the inquest into the police shooting of the lawyer Mark Saunders, suggested that the ‘can do’ organization may have been overloaded with codes, guidance and advice. In a letter to the Home Secretary, then Westminster Coroner, Paul Knapman, expressed his exasperation over the length and complexity of police manuals and their contribution to the failure of the operation he had investigated. He argued that complex and conflicting advice ‘could be amalgamated, simplified or dispensed with’ and that what was left should be ‘set out in simple and unsophisticated language, minimising jargon’ (cited in Davies, 2010, p.1). Its impenetrability to many aside, the greatest failing of police doctrine is that it can be interpreted as a kind of ‘one size fits all’ that strips away all those situation-specific shades, tones and fine distinctions to be found in real life. Shorn of those essential elements, doctrine may translate into little more than pre-programmed responses to policing problems.

The police organization

The police service of England and Wales is made up of 43 separate police forces, under the command of a chief officer, each with their own distinctive organizational structures that have developed according to their individual historical, demographic and geographical differences, and the styles and philosophies of successive chief officers. The str...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Robert Reiner
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Setting the Contemporary Policing Scene
• 2 A Brief History of Investigative and Intelligence Practice in Britain
• 3 Intelligence-Led Investigation
• 4 ILP in the Contemporary Era
• 5 ILP as a Catalyst for Policy/Knowledge Transfer
• 6 Evaluating the NIM: Challenges to the Model
• 7 Evaluating ILP and the NIM: Urban Case Study
• 8 Evaluating the NIM: County Case Study
• 9 The Prospects for ILP
• Notes
• References
• Index