Setting up an intelligence unit with more complex crime in mind

Mar 06, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The Intelligence Unit (IU) is to be viewed as comprising public specialists who furnish support to both police management and operations. Today, in most instances, the IU emphasizes the combating of organized crime.
The following text presents a more encompassing role for the unit. Basically, the IU is considered a feeder of needed information to all specialist and generalist components within the police department.
It serves, therefore, as an information center on criminal activities that are mainly “latent” (for example, vice, narcotics, and the like).
The major responsibilities of the unit are:
1. Elicit, process, and supply information on criminal matters.
2. Advise the police management on issues involving strategic decisions
3. Advise police operations for the purposes of tactical decisions.
Intelligence is the result of a complex process, sometimes physical and always intellectual. The end product is most often an informed judgment; it may also simply be a careful description of a state of affairs; it can be a single fact, or a good guess. The process that generates these judgments, descriptions or facts and near facts is called the intelligence process.
The intelligence process refers to data and their conversion into information useful for police purposes.
The process includes the collection of data, the collation (or combining and storage) of data; the evaluation and analysis of the collected and stored data, and the dissemination of the analyzed and evaluated material.
Collection and storage are traditional pursuits of law enforcement agencies. The systematic exploitation of raw data through the operation of the intelligence process can turn information into intelligence. Raw information can be processed into a variety of intelligence outcomes.
In the simplest form, it may be no more than descriptive, the biography of a known organized crime leader, the background history of a criminal activity, a sketch of the human relationships in an illegal business organization, and so on.
Such intelligence normally is used by intelligence officers to help them in their work, as material to supply them with an awareness of the criminal world they are exploring. It can also become an input to intelligence reports and studies.
This type of information when received by a law-enforcement agency is call indications intelligence.
The most useful way of categorizing the differences in intelligence outcomes is to focus on the use of the material by consumers of intelligence. On this basis, there are two interrelated categories: tactical and strategic intelligence.
TACTICAL INTELLIGENCE
Tactical intelligence contributes directly to the success of an immediate law-enforcement objective. It may be the supplying of a lead to a criminal investigator; compilation of a list of potential surveillance subjects; some small new fact supplied by an observant police officer who is aware that reports on the activities of a certain loanshark are being entered in a dossier on the subject. Clearly, tactical intelligence can take many forms.
STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE
Strategic intelligence is the most vital form of the result of the intelligence process. It is a blending of facts and analysis to produce an informed judgment on a major aspect of a law enforcement agency’s objectives.
An example of strategic intelligence would be a report to the head of a police agency on the outcome of organized crime in a major sector of the urban area.
Strategic intelligence differs from tactical in that it deals with the larger issues with which the police managers of the agency are concerned, not the nuts and bolts of intelligence support, which the investigator or patrol officer on the street must have to do his job.
THE THREE
ESSENTIALS OF AN INTELLIGENCE UNIT
There are three essential components of an intelligence unit. Or to put it another way, there must, at a minimum, be provision for three activities to take place. The absence of anyone of the three could have a crippling effect on the effective functioning of the intelligence unit.
Other subunits can be added to the three, but the minimum essentials are:
1. Files containing information arranged in a manner that lends itself to rapid and effective analysis.
2. A formal, permanent arrangement for a flow of raw information to reach the unit from whatever sources can be tapped: unit investigators, technical collection devices, other reporting elements of the agency and other agencies, public and official record repositories, and private data collections where possible and legally defensible.
3. One or more staff specifically designated as analysts. The staff member(s) should be capable of developing from the file records and the incoming raw information patterns, networks, connections, and new areas of organized or other crime penetration.
Other factors should be taken into consideration where sound intelligence is desired.
1. To unravel a major criminal syndicate may take many months or years of painstaking work; it may require temporary moratoriums on arrests of criminal offenders while more intelligence is gathered to gain access to ever-higher echelons of the group.
2. Organized crime’s involvement in some apparently legitimate businesses requires the use of specialized intelligence officers, frequently from outside traditional law-enforcement agencies; they would probably not be authorized to make an arrest no matter how eager they might be to do so.
3. The intelligence officer must not become partisan about any particular operational policy.
PRIORITIES
Intelligence units should endeavour to:
1. Expand and reorganize the unit’s base on crime so that it can be manipulated in a variety of ways. First and foremost this will mean the setting up of functional files on businesses, city sectors, travel patterns of known hoodlums, and so on – cross-referencing them to existing biographical files.
2. Employ such specialists as economists, accountants, attorneys, and even systems analysts
3. Look beyond traditional concepts and images concerning the application of intelligence units.
It is not possible to predict now the forms that organized crime will assume throughout the country over the next decade, but it is possible to say with some conviction that they will be different, and certainly more complex.
Robert Gates

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