ABSTRACT
Compared with the UK there has been less explicit discussion of ‘intelligence-led policing’ in either Canada or the US. However, intelligence techniques have been applied there in law enforcement for as long, if not longer, and there is certainly more evidence of practitioner reflection and writing on the issue in North America. On both sides of the Atlantic, intelligence techniques were used earliest in the specific context of political policing - the development of special branches in the UK (Bunyan, 1976, 102-29) and the equivalent ‘red squads’ in major US cities (Donner, 1990). These persisted through the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the political and industrial unrest of the period while the more explicit application of such techniques to ‘crime’ developed slowly from the 1950s onwards, more or less in line with the perceived seriousness of the threat posed by ‘professional’ or ‘organised’ criminality. From the 1970s onwards there were also a number of experiments with the targeting of repeat offenders in the US (Heaton, 2000, 340-2). In the 1990s, developments in both Canada and New York have even more closely mirrored those in the UK, for example, Eli Silverman’s study of NYPD:
What is new since 1994 is the setting in place of unusual engines of organisational change within the NYPD. This change has been sustained not just by strong leadership but through the dynamics of intelligence-led policing. (1999, 179)
Canada
Police in Canada have been making use of intelligence techniques since the late 1950s (Stewart, 1996, 84-5) and of specific intelligence units since the early 1960s (Prunkun, 1990, 20) but little is known about their operations (Brodeur, 1992). Given the RCMP’s size (in 1993 its establishment was
22,632), status as national icon (Walden, 1980), and national ‘reach’, it might have been expected that it would provide the lead in co-ordinating police intelligence efforts but this was not the case because the apparent national reach of the RCMP disguises the fact that it is directly responsible for the ‘low’ policing of only 10% of the population, and that is entirely rural. It was only in May 1991 that its own headquarters Criminal Intel ligence Directorate became operational as a result of the perception that the failure to develop a strategic intelligence capability had seriously hindered the Force’s ability to measure, let alone prevent crime having ‘an organized, serious or national security dimension in Canada, or internationally as it affects Canada’ (RCMP, 1991a, 1; see also Smith, 1997).
