NCJ Number
212854
Date Published
2003
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This chapter attempts to develop a framework for asking questions about intelligence development by and intelligence sharing between diverse agencies, thereby making a general assumption that the forms taken by criminal enterprises are at least partly the result of criminal organizers’ counter-measures to strategies of control.
Abstract
Central to understanding the operation of a control environment and organized criminal adaptations to this control, is the sharing of intelligence (information) and counter-intelligence. In this chapter the author argues that prospective research and policymaking on organized crime should focus on the interactive nature of intelligence sharing. What this involves is a movement away from specialization, in both the conduct of agencies engaging in law enforcement, disruption, administrative measures and market regulation, and in the way policy-oriented learning is organized. Intelligence is now detaching itself from the specific, separate, and limited spheres that previously generated it. Intelligence about organized crime is, by definition, multi-agency intelligence. The four main players involve the police, the police and other agencies, other state authorities of many kinds, and regulatory agencies. The four sectors of control define the control environment with which organized crime must operate. What the organized crime phenomenon means is that there is a tremendous motivation to get agencies to cooperate in order to combat the forms of organized crime that confront them. The most recent form of cooperation is the relation to information, which when shared, exchanged, combined, and acted upon, becomes “intelligence.” Notes, references