Criminology

What has been the impact where police and intelligence operations have been vested under the one agency Vesting a single agency with the task of policing and intelligence gathering had brought mix impacts and results, both positive and negative. Integrated agencies of both policing and intelligence gathering are less prone to the lowering of the democratic threshold. The MI5 of the United Kingdom for example is often accused of working independently even without ministerial permission. As stated in the article, this can encourage governments to contemplate unwarranted departures from customary civil judicial practices (Chalk, et al 2004 p. 50). Another strength of an integrated police and intelligence force lies on its ability to relay or pass intelligence to relevant authorities. Contrary to agencies like MI5 and CSIS, these specific intelligence agencies have been accused of inability to pass necessary information to relevant authorities. This brought success to different terrorist incidents that could have been prevented only if the necessary information had been passed to relevant authorities (Chalk, et al. 2004 p. 52).

On the other hand, the weakness of an integrated agency will lie on the distraction brought by a case-oriented investigations of the law enforcement agencies. Separated intelligence agencies will have more time, resources and expertise that can be used in tracking criminal actions both short term and long term (Chalk, et al. 2004 p. 43-44). Another notable weakness of an integrated police and intelligence agencies lies on a limited pool of professionals and personnels that will be interested in working in the law enforcement agencies. Unusual professions like linguists, historians, psychologists etc. that can really bring development in solving and preventing crimes are less likely to join law enforcement professions because of the certain restrictions of domestic policing environments. (Chalk et al. 2004 p. 46)

Can intelligence be actionable when one of the three t elements is missing
Though it was agreed by many agencies, sectors of governments and neutral investigators that it is really difficult to stop an imminent terrorist attack without the presence of all three T elements of an actionable plan (Derksen 2004 p. 265), I would still like to argue that these three elements does not have the same weight in providing a decent course of action. Analyzing the table (p. 262 or Appendix 1) provided by Derksen wherein he outlined the availability of information of the three Ts, the type-information became the most disclosed element in terms of its number of sources. The type of attack element comprises 4 out 6 of all the intelligence sources. The other two elements namely target and timing were only disclosed once by one individual source.

Analyzing the disclosed information of the target and timing of attack, we can argue that it brought more success despite its limitation of the number of sources. Rick Rescorla for example who who was cited in the article is the one who managed to extract the information regarding the target building of the terrorists. With his vigilance due to his knowledge of the target building, he pushed for the relocation of the Morgan Stanley to another building. Though his appeal had failed, it can be still stated that his vigilance had managed to save more than 3000 employees of the said company (Derksen 2004 p. 258). The NSA discovery of the timing on the other hand can still pose a greater importance in the production of a viable plan if only the agency managed to extract the information earlier than it had (i.e. the information of the timing was extracted on September 10, 2001, one day before the event).

From this discussion we would like to argue, that it is still possible to produce a decent actionable plan and course of actions even though we lack a single element which is the type of attack. Though certain situations like a nuclear attack will definitely require the knowledge of the nature of attack, some attacks such as the 911 can be prevented with the knowledge of only two elements namely the location and the timing of the attack.