Knowledge Based Policing
Background
More recently policing has been evolving into a more proactive approach building collaborations with other agencies to marshal resources and direct them at identification of potential risks, as well as developing strategies to target and neutralize or eliminate possible offenders, suspect activities or even locations. These changes were partly in response to emergent theories perceiving police work as identifying, gauging and management of risk which preys on the sense of insecurity that preoccupies society today. This marked the beginnings of intelligence based policing. This refers to the a policing philosophy that uses a business like model which lays emphasis on intelligence gathering and analysis of data as an important framework for reaching objective decisions to reduce crime, target and disrupt prolific or serious crime and thusly preventing it by employing strategies which are enforced effectively.
Thus rather than being reactive in the fight against crime, knowledge based policing is a futuristic and strategy based way of controlling crime that identifies, manages and eliminates repeat or persisting risks.
Before the emergence of knowledge based policing, there were and still are other policing philosophies among the community policing and problem oriented policing.
The traditional model of policing was basically the one size fits all model which employees the reactive strategies to suppress crime and arrest criminals regardless of the rate, nature among others of the crime. This models response to soaring crime is to increase the frequency of patrols, raise the number of police agencies, more rapid response to calls, and prompt investigations of crimes once they happen among others. These measures were successfully ensuring reduced crime in the short term but long time crime reduction proved to be challenge.
Community policing model aimed at employing organizational strategies which involve creation of partnerships and devise techniques that would proactively enhance security by dealing with issues that give rise to the problems in the first instance. Community policing involves a closer partnership between the public and the police to devise problems to solutions, allay fear and create public confidence in the police, these partnerships involved those with other public and private agencies and businesses. Secondly, community policing involved proactive problem solving by identifying the problems, assessing their seriousness, devising solutions to them and then evaluating the success of the applied remedies. In addition, organizational transformation to support community based partnerships occurred, these included more community friendly agency management, geographic assignment of officers and better communication systems between the cops and the public.
It has always been believed that useful gains could be derived from a closer association between the police and the public which was the motivation behind community led policing. This has led to the establishment of the neighborhood policing programs which are charged with setting up neighborhood policing teams, an approach which has been taken up by many police departments across the United Kingdom as well as the world. These were important avenues through which the police could interact with the community by convening public meetings. These meetings have not only been historically held and formally recognized by police authorities across the world, but they are equally easy to hold as against other ways of accessing the similar information. But these initiatives were limited due to the lack of clarity in definition of the roles that meetings were meant for, whether these were to encourage the more volunteering of information to the police, help better definition of the communitys priorities or creating the forum through which police can report to the communities. In addition, only certain portions and types of people found those meetings any useful leading to the ritualizing of the meetings which in turn reduced their usefulness.
A new approached emerged in an attempt to make community policing more effective and rendered it increasingly reliant on the ability to detect crimes before the happened, this drew on problem oriented policing. Problem oriented policing hinges on the ability of ordinary police men to objectively identify crimes and goes about dealing with those problems through a well defined procedure. This procedure calls for the identification of the problems which are then carefully analyzed to establish their causes for which proper solutions are developed and applied. Then once solutions are implemented an evaluation of the effectiveness of those solutions is conducted, this process is commonly termed as SARA. For decades now POP has served as an important to the way police responded to, and solved societys problems and owing to its proactive aspect rather than simply responding to crimes.
The solutions to problems are explored by the policemen on the streets, together with the communities. It involves exploring a range of alternatives which are mainly based and focused to the community, environment and targeting particular offenders. Since its emergence, Problem oriented policing has successfully been employed in combating alcoholism, sex offences and the like and the use of SARA remains a crucial influence of those successes. Even so, POP influences decision making by police officers as regards proactive prevention of crimes as well as the customary active fighting of crimes, and often there is a tendency to avoid the latter in favor of proactive ness. In addition problem oriented policing gives discretion to individual police officers to intervene in cases that were better left alone previously the consequences of such interventions both social and professional would render officers conservative and would make them in fact refrain from intervening.POP has drawn criticisms from varied corners as old fashioned and unable to deal with harsh realities of organized, and cross border crimes which requires well coordinated efforts to disrupt and prevent to avoid the risk of the crimes being committed in the first instance.
Strategic Use of information
The strategic use of information is a process that involves three basic stages where the management continuously interprets the environment of crime and in turn use the intelligence gathered to influence decision makers who make appropriate strategies to effect desired changes in the criminal environment. All these stages of the model are vital for the success of intelligence based policing model, the success of varied strategies in crime reduction may be due to different causes but if those strategies are not based on sound intelligence then the ability of decision makers to identify rising trends, make evaluations of crime fighting strategies or even monitor the changes in the criminal environment would be hampered by the lack of criminal intelligence.On the other hand, lack of quality intelligence based on objective analysis of the criminal environment would result into a wrong assessment of risk as regards the different crimes and thusly would render the strategies ineffective. Even with the availability of objective intelligence gathered by the intelligence cell of the police, but the there may be a failure to convey the same to other parts of the system especially the decision makers. The boots on the ground must be equipped with the strategic information as well as the top level executives who make decisions to allocate police resources. Thusly it is important that information gathered through the interpretation of the criminal environment is passed on to the decision makers who upon being convinced by it, design creative strategies to fight crime that will ultimately have appositive impact on the crime environment.
Emergence of knowledge based Policing
The longing for reform in policing was borne out of the frustrations by top policemen as well the governments since increased allocation of money into the police had not resulted into the fall in crime rates and a fall in the detected cases led for the need to develop better ways of gathering intelligence and investigation of crimes that would move away from the traditional reactive ways that had been hampered by new police acts in addition to powerful forensic technologies that had been developed such as surveillance, data storage and sharing technologies that could be leveraged successfully in the intelligence gathering and effect a proactive way of fighting crime.
There was as well a growing desire to improve community policing by increasing the analysis of data already in the police systems and keeping tabs on both open as well as covert sources of intelligence would help the police to be a lot more effective and efficient in crime reduction. This would involve using a structured approach in targeting specific criminals as well as crime areas among other such approaches, which will effectively result in the creation of knowledge based community policing.
Ideological and economic problems as well as the challenges posed by globalization, rising organized and transnational crime rocked governments in the latter part of the 1980s led to the implementation of austerity measures in the civil services and policing was not spared. This resulted in the call for effective and more accountable way to use public resources, which many thought by then, knowledge based policing would go a long way to meeting this desire by both the public and government in Britain.
Knowledge based policing emerged and developed over the past two decades ever since the publication in 1993 of the Audit report calling for more effective ways of tackling crime. The Audit report came in the wake of soaring crimes rates which had risen by over 74 in the preceding decade which was coupled by 11 fall in the number of crimes detected and prevented by the police from 37.
The Audit commission called for a more efficient utilization of police resources, a change from reactive crime fighting to a more proactive manner of forecasting neutralizing threats before the damage was wreaked and most importantly, the report spelled out the duties as well as roles that police officers were to assume in crime investigations.
A further joint publication in 1996, of the management handbook by the Audit Commission together with the HMIC and the ACPOCC emphasized the important role of intelligence if crime reduction and prevention as part of a comprehensive business like way of tackling crime. This resulted in the development of the National Intelligence model template which was a hierarchical well meshed approach that gathered and drew on intelligence from both national as well as regional levels and used it to strategically deploy resources to attain the maximum possible effect.
The national intelligence model was launched in the United Kingdom bringing into being a shift in police activities from reacting to crimes to proactive gathering of intelligence from varied sources and applying analytical techniques then actively targeting criminals and crime hot spots. This model of organizes information and knowledge to facilitate the best possible decisions are reached as the deployment of resources, flawless coordination between various activities.
The National intelligence model was designed in such way as to help combat cross border crimes, local area crimes as well as transnational and organized crime and to ensure this it draws on collaborations with other non policing agencies and builds networks both locally and across borders.
Local crimes affect limited areas, criminals as well as small communities. There scope may vary but they are numerous and affect the quality of life of communities affected and these can usually be fixed by local problem solving with the help of local authorities among other agencies. Criminality refers to crimes that affect large areas and may involve several forces and their solution would require proper identification of the problem area by using efficient networks as well as receiving the necessary assistant fro other agencies.
Transnational crime and organized crime constitutes serious sophisticated crimes that cover whole countries and may span more than one country calling for a national effort that cannot succeed unless there is cooperation from other countries. These crimes have only grown worse with the innovations in technology, advances and increased traveling activities, better information technology and more so by globalization which has had the effect of dissolving away national borders to criminals.
The development of networks and the efficient used of information technology is hardly the only motivation for the rise of intelligence based policing but some aspects of the model like specific definition of problems and subsequent evaluation were already well employed in some manner or other in the Problem oriented approach.
The National Intelligence model divides policing into two basic fields namely business as well as the ends arising from that business which are coordinated by the tasking and coordination committee which conducts its business in two ways which depend on each other, one based on strategy and another on tactics. The choice of tactics and strategies depends on the four types of intelligence namely criminal intelligence which deals with known criminals, general criminal intelligence that allows the police to develop a better picture of the crimes, environmental intelligence that provides the social, political and economic implications of crimes as well as the community intelligence which draws from information volunteered by the society to the police.
This two fold structure applies at all the three levels of crimes and there are clear interdependencies between them, not least because decisions made and priorities set at every level affect those of other levels.
The flexibility of the National intelligence model is in recognition of the fact that crime is dynamic and may operate at different levels whether directly or through the cause and effect process and as such, the model operates at various levels too and it has standardized the police procedures at all levels.
Impact of KBP on crime
The contribution made by intelligence based policing to reduction of crime in the United Kingdom is significant. In the previous five years, crime has fallen by over 11 percent with a notable fall in the local crimes. The fall in burglary, car crimes and other such crimes is hugely attributable to the rise of forensic technology, most notably DNA and finger print technology, both of which have been well used by the intelligence based model of policing as shown by the development of the National DNA database.
Evaluating of the success or failings of the National intelligence model is still unclear owing to the lack of standards to base the evaluation on. Evaluations of the model have tended to be based on its ability to effectively gather and disseminate intelligence and workable strategies to reduce crime rather than the ability of the model to effect an actual reduction in crime rates.
The effectiveness of the model has also been hampered by difficulties in implementation difficulties that are cultural, structural and technical in nature, which has in turn led to growing frustration among both the police as well as the public. In the United Kingdom, this has led to the return to neighborhood policing initiatives thus a return to the reactionary approach to policing.
While intelligence based policing has significant similarities with the problem oriented policing as well the community based policing, its similarities with the national intelligence model are the goes which have determined the ultimate success of the model especially in the United Kingdom.
Beyond the United Kingdom, the intelligence led model has been adopted in varying forms and equally different degrees without the total committing to all the key tenets of the model which makes it difficult to asses its success or failure. There may be use of intelligence in some cases, but there really is no management level assessment of the criminal environment and the development of tactical and strategic decisions to bring about positive changes in the criminal environment.
Indeed many police departments have had structural and organizational changes to built some aspects of intelligence based policing with concomitant savings in resources while the implementation of the model by Australia especially in Canberra, where a burglary reduction campaign drew on many aspects of intelligence led policing including targeting of crime hot spots and increased use of surveillance which yielded a massive reduction in the rates of burglaries across the city which in fact carried on into the future.
The rise of intelligence based policing has brought with it increased surveillance and spying. These come at a great expense but also there are increasing concerns with increasing the role of police in individual citizens lives.Intelligence based model emphasizes the use of surveillance both physical as well as electronic (like CCTV cameras) and the increased use of secret and open community informants. It is beyond doubt that police have always relied on informants on spies to obtain information from the general public but the increased scale as well as the strategy has drawn fears of invasion of peoples privacy.The cost of increased security and reduction of risk would come at the expense of reduced privacy of the individual citizens and thusly raised a moral objection to increased implementation of the intelligence based model of policing.
These concerns have been brought on by the post September 11th climate which have led to a complete disregard of peoples privacy. The political thinking these days has views terrorism as a important threat to the national securities on many a country sufficient to occasion a more rigorous policing approach to identify and neutralize the risk. Eve n though it was not designed to be counter terrorism, the business like model and its flexibility make it quite capable of taking counter terrorism into its stride besides ensuring neighborhood security.
Criminal street gangs that have for a long time always been considered local concerns have with the dawn of globalization gone international and so have the previously local militia which have also become national and even international as better evidenced by the success and global reach of the Russian and eastern European criminal gangs, Italian mafia, the Colombian cocaine dealing gangs, Costa Nostra among others. In addition cooperation and growing networks between these criminal gangs has only boosted their power and global presence which is made worse by the ease of movement of the gangs which renders it impossible to track them by use of national criminal databases for significant results.
This calls for the police to expand their nets for such groups by expanding their investigation boundaries either by extending their investigations across borders which will cost money or by developing networks with other police and non police agencies across borders which will yield information at no extra cost.
Intelligence has wholly negative connotations to the public, views ranging from subterfuge to secret operations by shady officers who break every other laws to reach their ends, and yet intelligence has little impact or meaning to regular police officers who consider it a secondary part of their work carried out by a small section of the force. The advent of intelligence based policing has raised new fears about the rising role of the police in peoples lives. These fears are legitimate and must be addressed through the enactment of proper legislation that would ensure that the provision of security and reduced risk does not come at the expense of the loss in rights of people to privacy.
Conclusion
There are certainly no easy answers to policing but intelligence led policing offers a realistic opportunity to the police departments across the world with an objective approach to fighting crime grounded in intelligence and which is more effective and a lot more efficient in the management of risk. And in order attain this much it is absolutely imperative analysis of crimes and intelligence go hand in hand to create an intelligent and bigger picture of the criminal environment as well as increased information sharing. Though in early stages of implementation, its success in the United Kingdom as well as other countries like New Zealand and Australia promises a more efficient and effective way of policing that would not only be useful in long prevention of crime but would as well devise lasting solutions to crime and insecurity.
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