Investigative Intelligence- Chapter 6 Lecture Notes
TARGET SELECTION
Many analysts receive little direction and are responsible for targeting decisions.
- Recording crime details
- Most targeting decisions are based on recorded crime details.
- Many variables are recorded, but few analysts have time to analyze them. Forexample, modus operandi is a variable that is little understood for targeting.
- Distance between crime events is believed to be a reliable indicator for crimelinkages.
- ViCAP is a initiative that tries to better utilize modus operandi variables, but suffers from under‐reporting.
- Threat assessments
- Published threat assessments, often from agencies with national or regionalresponsibility, is a way to influence the target selection of local agencies.
- Harm, and social harm based models are starting to feature in threatassessments. Met Police have four types: social, economic, political, indirect.
- Risk assessment may be a more accurate name for these documents.
OBJECTIVE TARGETING AND OFFENDER SELF‐SELECTION
- The snowball approach to targeting criminal gangs works to increase theintelligence available to police departments, but it runs the risk of focusingpolice attention on the ‘usual suspects’.
- This creates a positive feedback loop. For example, RCMP Sleipnir programdrew attention to the need for information on outlaw motorcycle gangs, andthis request alone made police departments focus more on OMCGs.
- Offender self‐selection may be a more ethical approach. Existing criminaltriggers are used to identify more serious offenders. Offenders bring policeattention on themselves.
- Playing well with others
- Information sharing is a US priority after 9/11 but the organization of policedepartments militates against it.
- Small agencies rarely have the resources to address wider concerns.
- Bureaucratic hurdles often limit info sharing, so informal networks spring upto solve the problem.
- Solutions include team‐based task forces, wider dissemination of intelligenceproducts, and liaison officers attached to neighboring agencies.
INFORMATION COLLATION
- The intelligence cycle is often adhered to in a more informal state, and anunderstanding of the desired style of final product can help with collation.
- Intelligence requirements provide a structured mechanism, useful whenagencies collaborate
- Strategic and Tactical Intelligence Requirements (SIRs and TIRs)
- But… over‐reliance on law enforcement data can create products withsignificant limitations.
- Improving information sharing
- Kelling and Bratton note, ‘The problem for American policing is not so muchgetting the intelligence but making sense of it and sharing it with those whocan use it’ (2006: 5).
- A role for liaison officers?
- Liaison officers are becoming de rigor in many fusion centers and agenciesthat have to reach out across jurisdictional boundaries.
- However, few guidelines for the position of liaison officer exist.
- Confidential informants
- Within intelligence‐led policing, informants have become a centralmechanism to better understand the criminal environment.
- Their use is limited, in that few offenders have a view of the bigger picture ofcriminality outside their own immediate area.
- A key part of intelligence‐led policing is that informants should be used in amore strategic manner.
ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES
- Note that results analysis is simply evaluation, a key component of POP.
- Strategic thinking
- Strategic analysis often involves a range of skills that are quite different fromtactical analysis. This is often a challenging area for police analysts, and onethat is not high on training agendas.