Dear Editor,

Today, in most instances an intelligence unit emphasizes the combating of organized crime. Below I present a more encompassing role for the unit as a feeder of needed information to all specialist and generalist components within the police department. Such a unit would serve, therefore, as an information centre on criminal activities that are mainly ‘latent’ (for example, vice, narcotics, and the like). The unit’s major responsibilities would be to elicit, process, and supply information on criminal matters, and to advise the police management on issues involving strategic decisions, as well as advise police operations for the purposes of tactical decisions.

Intelligence is the result of a complex process, sometimes physical and always intellectual. The end product is most often an informed judgment; it may also simply be a careful description of a state of affairs; it can be a single fact, or a good guess. The intelligence process refers to data and their conversion into information useful for police purposes. The process includes the collection and collation of data, and then its evaluation, analysis and dissemination.

Collection and storage are traditional pursuits of law enforcement agencies. The systematic exploitation of raw data through the operation of the intelligence process can turn information into intelligence. Raw information can be processed into a variety of intelligence outcomes. In the simplest form, it may be no more than a biography of a known organized crime leader, the background history of a criminal activity, a sketch of the human relationships in an illegal business organization, and so on. Such intelligence normally is used by intelligence officers to help them in their work, as material to supply them with an awareness of the criminal world they are exploring. It can also become an input to intelligence reports and studies. This type of information when received by a law-enforcement agency is call indications intelligence.

In terms of the use to which intelligence is put, there are two interrelated categories: tactical and strategic intelligence. Tactical intelligence contributes directly to the success of an immediate law enforcement objective, while strategic intelligence is the blending of facts and analysis to produce an informed judgment on a major aspect of a law enforcement agency’s objectives. An example of strategic intelligence would be a report to the head of a police agency on the outcome of organized crime in a major sector of the urban area.

Strategic intelligence differs from tactical in that it deals with the larger issues with which the police managers of the agency are concerned, not the nuts and bolts of intelligence support, which the investigator or patrol officer on the street must have to do his job.

There are three essential components of an intelligence unit; other subunits could be added but the minimum are: files containing information arranged in a manner that lend themselves to rapid and effective analysis; a formal, permanent arrangement for a flow of raw information to reach the unit from whatever sources can be tapped  (investigators, technical collection devices, public and official record repositories and private data collections where possible and legally defensible, etc) and one or more staff specifically designated as analysts.

The staff member(s) should be capable of developing from the file records and the incoming raw information patterns, networks, connections, and new areas of organized or other crime penetration.

Other factors should be taken into consideration where sound intelligence is desired. To unravel a major criminal syndicate may take many months or years of painstaking work; it may require temporary moratoriums on the arrests of criminal offenders while more intelligence is gathered to gain access to ever-higher echelons of the group. Organized crime’s involvement in some apparently legitimate businesses requires the use of specialized intelligence officers, frequently from outside traditional law enforcement agencies; they would probably not be authorized to make an arrest no matter how eager they might be to do so. The intelligence officer must not become partisan about any particular operational policy.

Intelligence units should endeavour to set up of functional files on businesses, city sectors, the travel patterns of known hoodlums, and so on, cross-referencing them to existing biographical files. They should employ such specialists as economists, accountants, attorneys, and even systems analysts, and look beyond traditional concepts and images concerning the application of intelligence units.

It is not possible to predict now the forms that organized crime will assume throughout the country over the next decade, but it is possible to say that they will be different from those we are familiar with, and more complex.

Yours faithfully,
Robert Gates