Re: Cheshire police stop 6,000 people during road network crime campaign

Kim Bolton wrote:
Ret. wrote:

Police officers are, on a daily basis, submitting intelligence
reports to their Intelligence Officers who sift through the
information coming in and link it all together on databases (used to
be huge card files when I first joined up).

So every time an officer has an interaction with a known active
criminal, whether or not he is committing a crime at the time,
information about the interaction will be submitted via an
intelligence report. That report will contain information such as:
Name of contact, date and time and location of interaction. Names of
people he was with. Details of any vehicles in use by him, etc. All
of this information is submitted and sifted and much of it placed on
the database and people and vehicles 'flagged'.

A decade or so ago one police force went through its 'intelligence'
database and had a weed-out. This caused consternation in some
quarters. One piece of intelligence that was culled was that "X was
seen in the Market Square at 14:00 on Saturday the Nth of February
1950".

This vital piece of information had been on file for 40+ years, and in
some probability X had moved somewhere else, or was dead.

So far, the public disclosure of police intelligence has shown how
poor its collection, verification, and analysis has been. For example,
market squares were very popular places on Saturdays in the 1950s, for
obvious reasons. If you think that what you describe above is a
coherent procedure leading to the formation of a perfect, complete, or
even adequate picture of anything at all, then I fear you are doomed
to disappointment. As a tool for harassment, it'll probably work just
fine.

In 'the old days' Kim - all this information was kept on card files - and there was no effective method of weeding out dated information without regularly going through it all. Bearing in mind that the average LIO in a small police station would have many filing cabinets full of such information - that was not an easy task. Today, with computerised databases, the situation is entirely different and intelligence reports will automatically flag up for confirmation or deletion after specific periods of time.

Your example given above again demonstrates the lack of knowledge of how policing works that is so commonplace on these threads. The fact that Mr X ( probably a suspected active criminal) had been spotted in the market place at such and such a time would appear to be inconsequential and irrelevant to anything. If, however, Mr X, was a suspected active burglar, and the following day a burglary of shop premises in the market place was reported, the fact that Mr X had been spotted in the vicinity would be highly relevant.

If the system of gathering intelligence about suspected active criminals was not effective - then it wouldn't be done. The ability to now rapidly search computerised databases of such intelligence reports, has dramatically improved its usefulness.

Ret.

.

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