Intelligent insights

The strength of intelligence-led policing is realised through community policing. The collection of information from within a neighbourhood maximises community safety. Within this principle I wrote my own paradigm: community intelligence-led policing methodology (CILPM).

A further consideration in the effectiveness of a police intelligence policy is specifically in context of the developing innovations in data analysis – artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, facial recognition, immersive technologies and advanced robotics are fundamentally dependent on the quality and quantity of information.

Community policing is at the heart of civil society; community safety is an adhesive that cements various factions together. A strong, loyal, healthy community is intrinsic to the debate as it can positively impact crime, as a characterful neighbourhood displaying positive bonds of inclusion will enhance police cooperation and foster bonds of trust. Consequently, a purpose of police intelligence is to interpret societal characteristics formerly from within, then without, and subsequently in relation to each other as the challenge is to obtain as much information (of a criminal nature) as possible from each sector of society.

Local communities, nor the public realise or understand the value of the information they knowingly and unknowingly hold. A community intelligence-led model is designed to enable the protection of its citizens and simultaneously, a process that will underwrite strategic and tactical policing policy, maximising the stream of community level intelligence into the operational policing decision-making processes.

Community intelligence does not require complex methodology to understanding social order, though it does go some way in informing law enforcement and is therefore significant in understanding the relationship between the offender, the police, the public, and the victim.

Here community intelligence provides policing with up-to-the-minute data, obtained at source. It permits law enforcement to analyse crime, and the causes of crime against a number of measures such are societal and cultural predispositions – organised crime gangs, depravation, cultural grouping, marginalised sectors or sub-groups.

CILPM is a solution within current policing structures to simultaneously stimulate community engagement, extract more intelligence, restore trust, enhance officer buy in, and improve community safety? A characteristic of policing prioritisation is the dual challenge of combating crime while boosting public reassurance.

A further consideration is that advancing technological capabilities designed to tackle diversification, intensification and evolution of crime trend patterns, be it serious organised crime, economic or cybercrime, the drug trade, rape and violence against women (VAWG), human trafficking, political activism and anti-social behaviour are arguably having a detrimental effect on the perception of public access to police.

The evolution of policing policy for the mid 2020s must be more than just recognising that police forces are predominantly both rural and urban in demographic profile. In the UK, policy must be as progressive as the County and Borough Police Act of 1856, which ended 600 years of feudal ‘keeping the watch’. CILPM commands attention, it is the antithesis of reactive policing, it is sentient, structured within the deliberate responsibility of duty.

There is hyperbole when presenting CILPM as progressive, this is because at its core it is a pragmatic methodology. The principle is not just a programme for policing, it is a doctrine of change – one of improvement. It is a principal function in that its data will inform policing hierarchy and government alike; it is of a region, it is of tactical and strategic planning, urban and rural, community and neighbourhood, city and town. CILPM is protection, prevention and detection.

UK experiences are those of many in the general population presenting a society under siege, police services under unmeasurable pressure, governments under intense scrutiny and communities where each individual citizen is at the behest of its criminals. Therefore, it is incumbent to offer solutions not mere repetition of statistics or emphasising each number is a victim of crime by challenging the apathy of perspicacity.

Policing understands policies and procedures, what is missing is a practical application that is compatible with existing record management systems, one which is understood by officers and forces alike, but more importantly by our police’s intelligence community.

There is a legitimate truth, it is not a theoretical, philosophical, or an academic challenge – it is a reality; therefore asking, how can policing implement with immediate effect a practical solution to confront, head-on, neighbourhood crime?

CILPM offers a resolute purposefulness. The observance of community intelligence programmes will significantly contribute to increased intelligence capability for local police, it will enable comprehensive collection of information from across all sections of communities and neighbourhoods, preceding dynamic dissemination of the intelligence within the wider law enforcement community, benefitting better-informed and professionally briefed workforces transcending earlier processes.

Simply put, community intelligence is local information which, when professionally managed provides intelligence on issues that affect communities within neighbourhoods, all of which contribute to a town, all towns contribute to a region, all regions contribute to a Force picture and are ultimately shared through the national infrastructure.

Local community management requires consultation, continuity, and consensus as both community safety and public satisfaction direct police to accept information from all sectors of society.

Intelligence lamination is a consolidation philosophy complementing and improving the capture of information. Lamination is understood to mean a combination of components that together provide a more resilient product, the provision of a stronger and more robust intelligence system, a model for combining closed, open and community data threads.

I make an analogy of CILPM being a horizontal layered compression of consciousness set against the vertical supporting pillars of insight, thus incorporating components of traditional intelligence models all the while integrating them as a more coherent and practical operational tool.

CILPM is an information repository, an intelligence reservoir. It is a facility for officers and staff to communicate observations, knowledge, concerns, hunches, opinions; or submit a supplementary contribution to a report, investigation, complaint, event, action, incident, accident, crime, even on anti-social behaviour; either about a person or persons unknown, of an inanimate object, vehicle, building, an occurrence; for want of a more accurate description, it is an electronic data arsenal.

It is where concerns can be voiced that do not constitute a crime complaint, an occurrence report, intelligence submission or cause an incident record to be created, for worryingly there is also a further concern as invariably there is a disconnect between call handler systems and record management databases.

What CILPM encourages is the inclusion of all employees of a police service, on or off-duty, fostering those who in their private citizen capacity attend public forums, neighbourhood watches, council meetings, village associations, religious gatherings, protests, ceremonies, formally or informally, officially or unofficially, those who shop, walk their dogs, exercise, tend their gardens, socialise within their communities or neighbourhoods to contribute to their community’s safety. It bridges from observations to conversations undertaken within the ritual of everyday life.

CILPM maximises intelligence data while offering force-wide protection through support of standard intelligence management; what it does additionally provide is flexibility within the operational setting, be that a city centre beat or a rural community. CILPM reinforces intelligence structures which provide police forces with the products that provide material in support of operational analysis, tactical or strategic planning, be it rural or urban implementation, and even adds significantly to city centre deployments (football tournaments, etc), up to and including national security.

The question of proportionality is appropriate in the 21st century; therefore, as this discussion concludes, I illustrate the due diligence with which it is exercised by policing in all its duties. It is for this article to emphasise that both privacy and scrutiny are of an equal value in a just and lawful society; that investigation of criminal and everyday connections are observed in such a way that concerns of a police state infringing on the rights of the individual as a cost to the safety of society is being nullified.

The right to privacy and the right to security are morally justifiable, they are ethical, principled and lawful. Likewise, both surveillance and privacy protect the rights of the individual, and that of communities, neighbourhoods, the general public and of democracy itself.

Where CILPM further diverges from the intelligence-led policing all the while compliant with the UK’s National Intelligence Model, is in the detail.

It is the flexibility of the application which excites, the capacity to examine the minutiae of a community, a location, an offence, a modus operandi.

The versatility of a methodology providing, vision, insight, understanding, plus one offering interpretation, affording early intervention and corroborating evidence through its uniqueness; from specific deployment to combat drug trafficking and people smuggling, to use at a music festival, through to confronting organised crime group retail outlet shoplifting, to enactment over a summer season for multi-national law enforcement deployments in Western Balkans. Correspondingly there is analysis of city centre anti-social behaviour, importantly it includes the protection of whole swathes of mountainous cross-border pastoral countryside.

The benefits for policing at grassroots level, within multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, urban, rural, domestic neighbourhoods informing on the insignificance of everyday life; from the deployment of the methodology as a standard procedure across the whole of a force’s regional units, to enhancement of data sources for analysis, AI and machine learning, all in the name of protection of the public from harm.

Rousseau’s, The Social Contract is brought to mind: “They are unaware that it is houses that make a town, but citizens who make the city.”

Steve Dodd is a retired South Wales Police detective. He is a subject matter expert on police intelligence having authored the force’s Community Intelligence Force Policy. An adviser on the College of Policing’s Intelligence Professionalisation Programme, he was deployed on the Government’s working group on the Western Balkans Serious Organised Crime strategy. An international liaison officer, he is an international airline certified extradition officer, plus National Financial Investigator qualified. He is currently writing his ‘Community Intelligence-Led Policing Methodology’ including the octahedron pyramid, a transtheoretical approach, and an inverted strategy thesis.