Police Intelligence

Police Intelligence

Intelligence in Public & Private Police: Symptoms of Divergence

Steven Hutchinson, from the University of Leeds, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Crime Prevention,” under the title “Intelligence in Public & Private Police: Symptoms of Divergence”. Here is the abstract: Over the past several decades, many western jurisdictions have witnessed the ‘convergence’ of public and private police into a larger ‘police industry’. This has been driven in part by the reshaping of public police management into a corporate executive, and by the transfer of ‘business principles’ from the private to the public sector. However the recent incursion of intelligence related practices and techniques into the industry as a whole may signal an important point of divergence between the two sectors. Increasing financial constraints and new political demands for police to do more with less, along with stiff resistance to intelligence related techniques from police associations, have led to the development of a very particular intelligence driven ‘business model’ for organizing and directing public police resources at an administrative level. However private police have long operated according to corporate business principles and the majority of the sector remains non-unionized. Private police have thus adopted intelligence quite differently: many firms now specialise in gathering, analyzing and disseminating overt and covertly gathered information to service various clients (including governments). Rather than disparate events, these two developments in policing are linked to similar processes – though at present they seem to signal some considerable divergence in the industry.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

Resources

See Also

Further Reading

  • “Intelligence in Public & Private Police: Symptoms of Divergence”, by Steven Hutchinson (Proceedings)

Posted

in

, , , ,

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *