POLICE METHODOLOGY
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 in 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, unfettered – though often benefiting from conflicting submissions, allowing for assessment, judgement and interpretation. Consequently, it permits law enforcement to analyse crime or the cause of crime against a number of measures such as societal or cultural predispositions - depravation, cultural grouping, or marginalising sectors or sub-groups.
What is happening? What do we know so far? What do I not know? What do I
need to know?
Circumlocution eventually leads to an explanation of how some intelligence collection strategy is achieved, for occasionally it is understood as the police having to engage in some form of trading relationship to obtain the information. In the UK this is achieved through Covert Human Intelligence Source or Key Individual Network engagement.
“Alarmingly, too much
intelligence opportunity is lost, or to be specific, not captured.”
It is further illustrated by police relations with minority and vulnerable communities, based on developing contacts with community leaders or elders. It is dependent on developing exclusive, strong working relationships with prominent members of specific community groups. This is both contrasted and complemented by the logic of the strength of weak ties in community intelligence. This premise is based on a diffusion of information, best explained by understanding how to access strands of insignificant information which are
distributed widely across a community, neighbourhood or social group. The notion of establishing a network of weak ties appears to contradict police intelligence practice. There are two issues here; firstly, the assumption that ordinary members of the public will hold, unconsciously, information of value, and secondly, following the premise, only a small number of people commit the majority of crime. It will only be small numbers of people who hold information of interest to police, which is in fact a fallacy. Accordingly, community intelligence can utilise loosely associated contacts in order to obtain information which can be as effective as using a number of deeper strategic sources.
Without the information there can be no understanding, without understanding there can be no progress, without progress there is only regression. I suggest police intelligence is missing a core strand of information that will enhance products, corroborate analysis, and substantiate any decision-making processes. My position is plain - everyone lives somewhere, everybody eats, drinks, shops; at one point in everyone’s life they had a relative, some have neighbours,
41 | POLICE | APRIL | 2024
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