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Intelligence and its Application to Contemporary Policing
* Bryn Caless is Director of Kent Police College
** Robin Bryant is Academic Director of Dept of Crime and Policing Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University College
Sir David Phillips was the Chief Constable of Kent from 1993 to 2003 and became President of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2001. He was Chairman of the ACPO Crime Committee for many years and has played a leading role in developing Investigation and Intelligence matters in British Policing. In this article he discusses how intelligence is frequently blamed when operations against criminals go wrong, the outcome of which is that it can be discredited. This is a dangerous scepticism, adversely affecting the ways in which policing is subsequently conducted and leading to reactivity rather than proactivity. A theory of intelligence would entail its subordination to operational command, the necessary separation of intelligence gathering and assessment from police operations, the requirement for commanders to understand intelligence as a commodity and the centrality of dispassionate analysis. What credible law enforcement counter-attack can there be against serious and organised crime unless through intelligence?
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The misuse of intelligence |
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Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, in his provocatively entitled book Military Intelligence Blunders Hughes-Wilson (1999), examines the last days of American conflict in Vietnam. He concludes that, despite the contemporaneous popular consensus, the general American strategy had been working, the Viet Cong were close to collapse, and the Tet offensive was a final, belligerent throw of the dice. Now this last desperate shake seemed to have failed with overwhelming losses and little real effect upon South Vietnam. This was not, however, immediately apparent. The US Intelligence community were unsighted on the thinking and capacity of their opponents. More importantly both they and Ho Chi Minh reckoned without the American press corps. The violent eruption of the Tet offensive presented television cameos of insurrection that, playing to an already vociferous defeatist, anti-war lobby, convinced enough of the American public that the game was up. The decision to quit had much more
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The use of intelligence |
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Elevation to theory |
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Some underlying principles |
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The search for meaning |
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