ABSTRACT
Much of the work of law enforcement lies outside the world of intelligence. Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) are expected to provide various services. Most LEAs will use extensive resources in the traditional aspects of law enforcement including overt patrolling, responding to calls for assistance, and carrying out investigative functions. These functions constitute the public perception of law enforcement and, in the minds of most citizens, will fall into two categories: the uniformed officer and the detective/investigator. These can be thought of as the “traditional” law enforcement roles, seen by the public through regular coverage in both factual and fictional television programs, and in movies. The use of the term “traditional” is not intended to have any derogatory connotation, nor is it intended to suggest an outmoded way of behaving. It is used here to suggest continuity in the nature of the work being undertaken: namely, protecting the community and catching the bad guys-the stuff cops have been doing for years. Historically, the roles of the uniformed officer and the detective are, for the most part, not normally associated with intelligence collection, except for the occasional portrayal of a detective having a street-level informant, as it is so realistically portrayed in the old television series Starsky and Hutch. Unfortunately, while most agencies have progressed away from this limited perspective, there still remain a few where anything to do with intelligence is viewed as something akin to an extraterrestrial life form. As already discussed, the purpose of intelligence is to support the more traditional aspects of law enforcement, but in turn it is incumbent upon the traditional aspects of law enforcement to support the intelligence function. This chapter explores the various ways in which traditional law enforcement activities can reap huge amounts of information that can be considered for intelligence purposes. It will highlight some of the problems that occur when a systematic approach is not used, and how
an agency can be left vulnerable if processes are not designed to capture the information in a structured way.
