ABSTRACT
Following the Second World War, different state agencies (the police, the Customs, secret services, fiscal and other administrations, market regulators, and so on) have generally regarded their concerns as nonoverlapping, and the sharing of information between them was ad hoc. Increasingly, however, these agencies consider themselves all to be involved, to some extent, in a common fight against the various facets of an extended and dangerous phenomenon, that of ‘organised crime’ (henceforth, ‘OC’). This chapter first develops a framework for asking questions about intelligence development by, and intelligence sharing between, diverse agencies. It then invokes the general assumption (drawn from enforcement practice and social theory) that the forms taken by criminal enterprises are at least partly the result of criminal organisers’ counter-measures to strategies of control. This raises a practical question for research and for policy: what new forms of criminality and social risk arise as unintended side-effects of, and reactions to, multi-agency intelligence exchange? Today’s intelligence environment also raises questions about the future of research.
