Organizational Pathologies in Police Intelligence Systems

During the 1990s serious and organized crime moved to the top of the agenda for policing internationally. This shift took place during the same period that new information and communications technologies were being adopted across the policing sector in most European countries, a shift known in some places as the rise of ‘intelligence-led policing’. Discussion of intelligence-led policing against serious and organized crime has tended to focus on formal models of intelligence systems. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the vocabulary of intelligence-led policing by providing the terms for describing the organizational problems that bedevil the organization of police information systems. It is based on original empirical research in the United Kingdom and a number of other countries and provides a lexicon of 11 organizational pathologies. The paper ends by arguing that strategic intelligence forecasts about future trends in organized and serious crime that emanate from the police sector are not as strategic or as comprehensive as they appear to be.