Intelligence Led Policing in the Post September 11th Era: The Need for Evaluating a Multi-Agency and Multi-Discipline Approach

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Table of Contents

Chapter 2: Literature Review1

What Is Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP)?1

Comparing and Contrasting Between Community Based Policing and Intelligence-Led Policing2

Evolution of Intelligence-Led Policing4

Fusion Centers6

Issues with Sharing Criminal Intelligence in a Multi-Agency Setting7

Bibliography8

Chapter 2: Literature Review

What Is Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP)?

Ratcliffe defines intelligence-led policing as a managerial philosophy or a business model in which crime intelligence and data analysis are very important part of the objective and the decision making framework. This assists problem and crime reduction through enforcement strategies and effective strategic management by targeting serious and prolific offenders .

According to Milligan, intelligence-led policing or ILP is a management and law enforcement strategy, whose prime objective is to collect, analyze and distribute intelligence information in order to efficiently and effectively connect criminal activities with the offenders who have committed those crimes . ILP provides a better understanding of the crime and criminality as it identifies the active criminals, checks which crimes are linked and identifies the places where problems can occur . Moreover, ILP ensures opportunities for positive interventions as it enables law agencies to target various resources more effectively against emerging trends and current challenges.

Ratclifee says that although some researchers consider ILP a new direction for policing, many other researchers connect ILP to other existing and current policing strategies . According to Baker, ILP philosophy incorporates with community based policing (CBP), CompStat policing and problem based policing strategies as the base for collecting accurate and precise intelligence regarding criminals and criminal activities .

Comparing and Contrasting Between Community Based Policing and Intelligence-Led Policing

Illustrative of the adaptive strategies has been the introduction of more proactive police models such as community based policing, which became very popular in the 1990s. Both models tried to address the observed problems mentioned above and developed in a large part in response to the more traditional, reactive, remote policing styles. We will briefly discuss the community based policing model and then turn to new model that has been embraced in recent times.

The community based policing model strongly recommends the need of a proactive approach so that the neighborhood problems can be solved and quality of life of the community can be enhanced. The idea behind this form of policing is that “the police cannot successfully prevent or, investigate crime without the willing participation of the public, therefore police should transform communities from being passive consumers of police protection to active co-producers of public safety”. As a result several initiatives were launched of which the most famous was Neighborhood Watch, widely implemented in North America and the UK , and in several other European countries including Belgium. Other similar initiatives, emerging at the end of the century, are publicity campaigns, informers and citizen patrols. These community-led crime prevention initiatives can be understood as 'responsibilization strategies': “A new mode of governing crime whereby individuals and organizations outside of the state apparatus are encouraged to take responsibility for crime prevention and ...