ABSTRACT
The Audit Commission never defined intelligence-led policing, nor did the National Criminal Intelligence Service when they issued the first public documents on the National Intelligence Model (NIM). Indeed, definitions of intelligence-led policing are hard to find, and most publications tend to discuss the challenges and merits of intelligence-led policing without actually defining it (for example, see IACP 2002). The situation appears to be analogous to the statement by US Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart, who, in a 1964 ruling regarding hard-core pornography, wrote, ‘I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.’ There appears to be an unwritten assumption that police officers and crime intelligence analysts may not be able to define intelligence-led policing, but they know it when they see it. Yet, without care and clarification, the term intelligence-led policing could become ‘trite and jargonistic’ (Keelty 2004: 6).
