Essentials for Effective Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP)

A Law Enforcement Agency Can Get One Step Ahead Of the Crimes in It Area by Following These Steps

Intelligence-led policing, commonly known as ILP, is a very crucial law enforcement philosophy. ILP actually came into existence after the 9/11 attacks as a strategy to combat terrorism. However, eventually, it has become an important practice in the police department on a regular basis. 

"Intelligence-Led Policing: A Policing Innovation," is authored by Dr. Jeremy Carter, an associate professor as well as the director of criminal justice at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, has described it as a policy that mainly focuses on collecting and evaluating intelligence/information from multiple sources for predicting and preventing any future threats.

“The idea behind ILP is that you cast this wider or more encompassing net of potential information inputs, and you push that information into some type of analytic process, and the result of that analytic process creates intelligence," said Carter. “That's a key distinction – raw information is just information. It's a tip, it's a lead. But it has to go through some sort of analytic process to become intelligence. And the idea behind intelligence is that it creates actionable things – what a police department can do specific to a problem, a threat, complex criminality, or whatever it's being applied to.”

The Bureau of Justice Assistance, in its report on how this ILP can help reduce crime, has listed ten steps to deploy the ILP initiatives. This report focuses on clearly defining the problem, effective intelligence, and constant evaluation.  The BJA has studied agencies of different size, operational and organizational structures, that serves as a case study and can be used by the law enforcement agencies as a role model in their respective departments. 

So, here is an abstract of those points with examples that can assist your agency in applying this policy according to the community.

1. Clearly Define the Problem

Knowing that there is a problem in your community is simply not enough. Rather, you must understand it properly before you devise any strategy for it.

For instance, San Diego City in 2007 was facing growing violence because of Asian Gangs. The initial step that San Diego Police Department had to take was to evaluate the actual problem before making a strategy to tackle it. 

The department, through the evaluation, found out that it was not identifying or targeting the key members or gang leaders. The company then recognized that it needs a more coordinated approach to tackle the crime rather than acting randomly. Moreover, the department realized that they have a faulty information collection and sharing system. For instance, when their detectives were transferred to other units would take the information collected with them. The department also realized that it needs to collaborate with other units, such as federal and state agencies. 

   2.Define the Goals Clearly

After identifying and evaluating the problem, the next step is to set feasible goals and define you’re your agency is going to do.

For instance, in the SDPD case, the agency realized that in order to combat gang activities and violence, the agency needs to target the shooters and the gang leaders who majorly contribute to criminal activities. 

   3. Result-oriented strategies and tactics

Once you define your goals, the next step is to devise the strategies to achieve those goals. It is important to craft the strategies in such a way that they address and tackle the problem directly. For instance, SDPD first tried to solve the problem by deploying broad law enforcement strategies but failed to get any considerable success. However, with the implementation of ILP, the agency first identified and assessed the problems and defined their goals. That is why the agency knew that it has to:

• Use intelligence gathering to identify the individuals.
• Work in collaboration with other agencies and strengthen the inter-department coordination as well.
• Get the concerned/targeted members off the street by applying maximum pressure. 

   4.Effective Intelligence

Intelligence-led policing is just a distant reality without information that can provide insights related to criminal threats. 

"Traditional crime analysis and investigations rely on talking to witnesses, talking to victims, talking to the offender or the accused, capturing information related to the incident, those kinds of things," Carter said. “But the idea behind intelligence and ILP is it's intended to be proactive and focus on threats generally. And to do that, you want to try and collect information from places that may not traditionally be considered sources of information for the police. Talking to business owners, hospitals, certain service providers, mental health clinicians – then systematically collecting information that can be used to input into some type of analytic process.”

In San Diego, this was a trigger point for expanding the information sources either these sources include locals or community, and then properly analyzing that information. This also meant the SDPD had to invest in specifically dedicated personal (informants) to collect intelligence. The gang unit started with four informants, and after a year, it had 60. This effective intelligence helped the unit in identifying the major figures in the gangs and prevent atrocious crimes. 

Carter, however, emphasized on differentiating between intelligence analysis and crime analysis. 

He stated, “Crime analysis is backward facing – you're looking at known data points regarding an event that happened. Intelligence analysis is looking to the future. You are forecasting or trying to predict based on information that you have. An analogy could be weather forecasting. A crime analysis approach would say, 'OK, tell me what the weather was – temperatures, the amount of rainfall – for the past week.’ Intelligence is more the forecasting of, 'Well, based on all these different indicators we have related to weather, we can anticipate that we will receive this much rain at these temperatures.’ The idea behind intelligence is to be proactive and to be forward looking.”

   5.Collaborating Effectively

Collaborating actively with different agencies (including federal, local, and state agencies) is as important as internal collaboration. Some may not believe it, but when you are in number, you have the strength. Collaboration and coordination make it pretty easier to combat matters like crime reduction and terrorism prevention. When different agencies are in coordination, they can utilize their resources in a much better way.

For instance, the gang unit in San Diego completely transformed its approach. Rather than operating alone, it collaborated with street cops, investigation units, and police from the local, state, and federal levels. This allowed the gang unit to collect/share information, find the links between different crimes, and make their moves on shooters and leaders in the gangs.

   6.Sharing the Intelligence

If you cannot share information with your partners, then there is no point in collaborating. Every agency develops its solutions in a different way. Agencies can share information in different forms, such as RISS (Regional Information Sharing Systems). Similarly, a fusion center is another viable option for information sharing. 

According to Carter, an Intelligence Liaison Officer (ILO) can be very handy when it comes to information sharing. He quoted, “ILOs are a designated point of contact for an agency and can help agencies get more directly to the information they're looking for from a specific department. And then those agencies have a single point of contact where they know who to call for such information.”

SDPD took this wonderful step of information sharing, which connected the departments within the agency as well as the external agencies to make plans for tackling the gangs' issues. Agencies shared and collected information by interviewing the locals as well as gang members without considering any piece of information small or inadequate. The PD also took help from the research of academic nature as well as other various gang-related methodologies and used them according to their needs. 

   7.Holistic Investigations

Holistic thinking is crucial for ILP. The BJA recommends that it is better to have merged investigations rather than focusing on isolated units to deal with one type of crime. Moreover, a lot of criminals specialize in multiple crimes. For instance, auto theft and other very impactful crimes are often interlinked with each other. If you want to adopt a holistic approach for vehicle crimes, then combining auto theft units and other investigative units that deal in identity theft, burglaries, and financial crimes, will make perfect sense. 

A holistic approach helped the SDPD in developing stronger relationships with other investigative units within the agency. This helped SDPD in getting a better picture of what was happening around and find the connections between different crimes. 

   8.Accountability for Officers

When an agency defines its objectives clearly, it is important to hold the agency cops accountable to achieve those objectives. In San Diego, the agency didn't focus on making the arrests. Rather, they assigned a specific role to every cop, such as assuming leadership or keeping the streets violence-free.  Ultimately, the crimes related to gangs were reduced significantly. 

   9.Regular and Constant Assessment

Taking initiatives is vital, but it is also very important to continuously assess the ILP or any other strategy you have applied. Reviewing your strategies, and making changes according to the situations is necessary rather than following them blindly. Carter said that every agency needs to ask these questions regularly:

• Should we look into bettering our collection requirements? Should we develop a different approach for collecting the information?
• Are we really getting that intelligence/information we are looking for?
• Are our efforts making a considerable impact related to what we want to achieve?
• Do we have any measurable results/outcomes?

  10.Committed Leadership

Last but not least, it is important to have agency leadership that supports ILP. In fact, an agency should have a culture where leadership change must not affect the agency's commitment to ILP. In their survey, the BJA studied ten agencies and found out that these agencies have smooth transference of leadership that was also dedicated to ILP programs. Whereas in other agencies, the leadership tenures were long enough to make the ILP programs as established practices. 

A Handy Tool in the Toolbox

ILP can be very effective for the agencies to stay ahead in the game if they can do things right. 

“You have opportunities to gain efficiencies and effectiveness through the use of ILP,” Carter said. “It's not a silver bullet by any means but it's another tool in the toolbox. It complements other policing strategies that police take to combat violence, to combat crime, to combat problems. The true benefit is that it lends this type of qualitative or contextual component to, 'What are we doing to combat these problems?' driven by analysis. It helps to inform police so that, rather than constantly reacting, they can hopefully be ahead of the curve.”