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Intelligence-Led Policing; What's in a Name?

Date last updated 5:31 pm Nov 25th, 2007

The term Intelligence-Led Policing sounds more mysterious than it is. In its purest form, ILP is about good, solid, collaborative police work. It is not surprising that police officers and departments that have strong, trusted relationships in their communities and with their peers are more likely to prevent crime and make arrests when incidents happen. It is within this context that ILP is evolving in the United States.

The use of the term Intelligence in the law enforcement lexicon is more descriptive of how collected information is synthesized, analyzed and acted upon than it is about the methodology for collecting the information. It isn’t about spying on people. It’s about taking disparate pieces of information, putting them together, analyzing their connection and drawing reasonable conclusions about their significance in explaining past events and/or predicting possible future events. Those conclusions are then used by decision-makers to allocate resources.

At the heart of the ILP process is collaboration, and central to collaboration, is trust. The sources of information, most frequently private citizens, must be motivated by a sense of common good, and trust that the information they provide will be appropriately utilized and protected. The police officers collecting the information need confidence that the information provided to them is factual and have an information management process in place that allows them to submit it for analysis. Analysts need to work closely with patrol officers and detectives to vet the information, aggregate it with information from other sources and analyze the collective significance. And decision makers need confidence that they are being given fact-based, well thought out recommendations.