Modern Policing in America: Rooted in concepts designed to counter threats, fundamental change is required. What needs to change and why.
Militarization describes just the tip of the iceberg. The problems will not be fixed until the paradigm that drives modern law enforcement is changed.
Editorial Note: A version of this article was published Friday, April 23rd, for SpyChess subscribers. SpyChess is a newsletter primarily focused on global security, counterintelligence, and intelligence issues.
As the American law enforcement (LE) and intelligence communities grapple with the threat of domestic extremism, they are also facing another challenge related to the fundamentals of policing and LE intelligence practices.
How LE deals with policing and intelligence practices will directly impact the effectiveness of attempts to counter domestic extremism. Part of the radicalization process for any movement involves grievances, real or perceived. Individuals do not turn to violence from day one. Violence is typically a last resort. Grievances add to grievances. Feeling excluded leads to isolation until you find or are discovered by a group that shares similar feelings and ideas about why something is wrong. Then it becomes a matter of how they find outlets to ask for change, achieve change, or at the very least allow for engagement and the possibility of change. The moment when individuals or groups feel they do not have outlets is when the potential for organized violence rises.
How does this tie to the fundamentals of modern policing and law enforcement intelligence practices?
While the militarization (the military style equipment used and worn by police, along with their over tactics and use of force policies) of police forces in the U.S. during the last twenty years captures most people’s attention, militarization only describes the tip of the iceberg compared to one of the root causes that does not draw attention–Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP).
ILP is the dominant lens driving policing across the United States. What is ILP?
Intelligence-Led Policing is a systematic and data driven approach to measuring and valuing threats. It is a lens that focuses on recognition, identification, classification, and reaction to (perceived) threats and/or potential future threats. Police mindset and activity is driven by the “threat” environment. It is a flawed model for policing that is derived from counterterrorism (CT), counterinsurgency (COIN), and intelligence practices. Practices that are designed to be used in places that face wartime conditions, including fighting insurgencies, civil wars, the presence of terrorists, or associated forms of organized and sustained violence, including hunting clandestine threats. These practices were not designed to keep a neighborhood safe or build trust in communities.
ILP is practiced across LE by a variety of stakeholders. For local/state levels, especially, it is use of a paradigm (originally conceptualized and practiced in the UK in the 1990s) meant for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency that distorts policing mindset and activity as well as distorting the mindset of the targeted population. There is wariness when you feel the police are looking at you first and foremost as a “potential” threat until proven wrong. The police also feel under siege and surrounded by threats.
ILP changes the relationship between policing and the people. While seemingly a data driven approach, it is, first and foremost, one designed to look for threats inside a population. This mentality bleeds into every fabric of policing.
Everything is a potential threat.
A local kid is not just a teenager. Network analysis shows that he went to school with someone who knows someone who is in a gang or has a criminal past. They run into each other once a month. Could he be a potential recruit into a gang? Is it signs of a gang spreading? Modern threat analysis, incorrectly applied, leads to the creation of endless threat cycles.
Police officers, detectives and leaders who are focused on and know how to build faith and trust with their local communities would likely approach the above scenario completely differently than the modern ILP approach.
While ILP is supposed to incorporate concepts like Community-led Policing/Community-oriented Policing (CLP or COP, I prefer CLP) into its framework, in practice the relationship between communities and police is short circuited because the driver for priorities and analysis is a never-ending search for THREATS.
One of the ironies of ILP is that while using the word intelligence in its title, the framework, as practiced by modern LE, completely misses that intelligence is not only about data. Technology has a way of framing intelligence through technical lenses that refer to the collection, processing, and analysis of data, especially quantitative data. While this is important, an equally important part of the field of intelligence is the human factor. It is why certain (there aren’t as many as you think) practitioners refer to the field of intelligence as an art not a science. Those whose expertise is on the art side of the field of intelligence know that building relationships, trust, and listening are critical to the art of intelligence. It is beyond the scope of today’s post, but this is applicable to the entire American intelligence community–data, military intelligence priorities, and wanting to deliver boom (kinetic operations), became the primary focus across intelligence services and organizations, to the detriment of human intelligence (HUMINT). Post 9/11, in a rush to import data driven concepts and practices from the field of military intelligence into policing, the human dimension of policing was lost, just as the art of human intelligence suffered at CIA and in certain ways at the FBI.
The use of ILP as a core framework needs fundamentally change. It does not need to be eliminated but needs to be reduced as a driving lens for policing as whole. I am primarily referring to local and state level policing. Federal LE and Federal domestic intelligence organizations have a much more complex mission set and a different role to play.
Local and state police forces need more detectives who spend all their time out on the street not more people who sit behind a desk looking at data.
They need to train officers, future detectives, and future leaders to be better at building relationships within their own communities.
The widespread use of ILP as the foundation for modern policing has led to not just police seeing threats everywhere but communities also seeing threats everywhere, including from the police.
For a variety of reasons, the media, policymakers, and researchers are failing to identify ILP as one of the roots of the problem. LE themselves may not be aware of the corrosive effect of ILP on their departments and on their communities.
This Tampa Bay Times article captures some of the problems with ILP.
Not only for the sake of American communities across the entire country, but for U.S. law enforcement to better counter growing extremism across America, including inside its own ranks, the issue of ILP as a paradigm for policing has to be addressed.