Integrated Intelligence and Crime Analysis: Enhanced Information Management for Law Enforcement Leaders

Law enforcement executives are increasingly recognizing that they are no longer in an information-poor world: data and information about the criminal environment and criminal activity abound. The challenge is to corral this wealth of data into knowledge that can enhance decision making, improve strategies to combat crime, and increase crime prevention benefits. In other words, the aim is to convert data and information into actionable intelligence. In many cases, however, this increase in data has not necessarily translated to an increase in knowledge. The structure of information handling processes within policing is not set up for the new millennium and ideas about intelligence management and dissemination from the 1970s still pervade the thinking and organizational culture of police agencies in the twenty-first century.

While many executives get access to crime analysis, sometimes through Compstat meetings or similar briefings, criminal intelligence is not integrated into the picture and executives make key decisions without access to all of the pertinent knowledge available within their organization. For much of the history of law enforcement, criminal intelligence—information that relates to the activities of criminal individuals or groups of offenders—was retained by specialized units or by individual detectives. Even with the introduction of intelligence units, these analytical groups often kept their information within the narrow confines of their specific unit. The focus of intelligence units was first and foremost on reactive, investigative support. This situation continues in most places today. For example, narcotics intelligence units do not share intelligence beyond their units, and street gang intelligence units do the same. In the new environment of intelligenceled policing, these information silos are too valuable as strategic resources for the whole police department to squander on the needs of an individual investigator or unit.

As we learn more about the abilities of organized crime groups to involve themselves in a range of criminal enterprises such as street crime, narcotics, human smuggling, and money laundering, it has become necessary to restructure law enforcement analytical services to better reflect this criminal environment. The risks are too high to stick with unit isolation and specialization out of simple bureaucratic convenience.

READ ON
http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/integratedanalysis.pdf