Police Intelligence: Unit I

• The material provided is about Police Intelligence

Unidad I. Inteligencia Policial

• Topics include the concept of intelligence, concept of police intelligence, characteristics of police intelligence, the basic principles of intelligence operations and the components of police intelligence

A. Concepto de Inteligencia

• Intelligence comes from the the Greek word "Inter-ligare" meaning integration function of the rational faculty of human beings, to find connections between things.
• In psychology, intelligence is the ability to know, analyze, and comprehend certain facts, or a technique of applied research in the search for practical knowledge.
• Military doctrine defines intelligence as the resulting product of the recollection, evaluation, analysis, integration and interpretation of all available facts concerning one or more aspects of adversaries or allies, for determining their vulnerabilities and possible courses of action.
• According to Article 29 of the National Security Law, intelligence is the knowledge obtained from the recollection, processing, dissemination, and use of information for decision-making regarding national security.
• The extinct National Research and Security Center sees intelligence as the knowledge used to assist the government in its nation security decision making within the framework of law, and is obtained through the process of planning, collecting, processing, dissemination, and use of information, which is a finished product.
• The Intelligence Area is also known as the analysis area or analysis and operations unit, in which the actions of data collection and informational processing that are intended to generate intelligence products fit for decision making processes performed.

Classification of Intelligence:

• In the National Intelligence Center (CNI), intelligence can be classified as strategic, tactical, and operative

B. Concepto de Inteligencia Policial

• According to the Chilean professor Guillermo Holzmann Pérez, police intelligence aims to identify and prevent terrorist or criminal threats that have the capacity to negatively affect the internal political security or public order, which collaborate plans and programs with police, where they have advisory capacity for the government, and involves overstepping police restrictions.
• According to the Panamanian investigator, Ricardo López Pollo, police intelligence is the capacity to produce knowledge of the present or future operations of an offender, criminal organization, and method of operation in the environment where the criminal activity is developed, in order to prevent criminal operations.
• Criminal investigations can be understood as a process in which an investigator takes steps for the discovery of a truth.
• This process begins with observation, description, and finishing with analysis or interpretation of events, including the environment, to attain objective information to accurately find the authors and participants of presumed criminal conduct.
• Intelligence for criminal investigations is a tool for clarification in that intelligence and products serve and support guiding reinforcements of the investigation.

C. Características de la Inteligencia Policial

• Subject of analysis involves an infractor of penal law, and their criminal conduct threatens the peaceful coexistence of members of society.
• The technique of investigation involves intelligence processing by means of an investigatory technique called the Cycle of Intelligence to obtain useful and timely knowledge.
• The theoretical base of planning which provides the theoretical basis for police operations that have the primary goal of neutralizing a punishable act before it is committed, by playing a preventitive role before the crime occurs.
• The command being informed in order to maintain an information chain for decision making and reduce uncertainty.

D. Principios Básicos de las Operaciones de Inteligencia

• Operations of intelligence must consist of specific principles for the job, to inform and prevent, these standards are important in any intelligence operations.
• To achieve successes, those in charge must make sure these principles are met.
  • Utilidad: This is where the police director is able to take certain operating, tactical, or strategic measures in which they have the right judgement to minimize some levels of uncertainty.
  • Interdependencia: the production of intelligence involves coordinating within the police for the police to satisfy information requests, and works with other sections of the police institution. Coordination between the crew in charge, produce intelligence, and the users need the product.
  • Oportunidad: Information is to be released at the right time. The information that is processed can potentially prevernt incidents with organized crime, and if the knowledge is not transferred immediately, information can lose importance.
  • Flexibilidad: This Guarantees success with any intelligence operation, where inflexible patterns or bureacratic methods are executed. There is a constant transformation using the modus operandi of the criminal to ensure the intelligence is flexible as possible.
  • Iniciativa: A police officer in charge of an intelligence task should possess imagination and ingenuity in order to complete tasks that are assigned to them. The initiative involves obtaining new information, and implementing new techniques to break down data.
  • Previsión: This involves measuring in great detail the dangers, risks, and possible problems that can occur during intelligence or counter intelligence operations at high levels within the organization.
  • Seguridad: It is not possible to think of an Intelligence Operation that does not offer security; in as much as security is one of the main concepts of any Intelligence. Data bases, information gatherers, collaborators, mechanisms of operation, all go toward denying unauthorized personnel access to information handled by the Intelligence Section.
  • Compartimentación: Information must be strictly shared to a person to fulfill the mission objective. Divulging intelligence can lead to severe consequences.
  • Continuidad: Constantly recollecting information on a current situation ensures all conclusions are up to date. The cycle of intelligence always has to provide constant current knowledge.
  • Protección de los Derechos Humanos: (Protection of Human Rights) There is a high fundamental standard of operating intelligence, in order to know moral and ethical guidelines for police officers that dedicate their time to these functions.

E. Componentes de la Inteligencia Policial

• The information represents the prime matter, where intelligence sections work, but it is only used by the police when indispensable elements are processed into police intelligence.

• To find a solution to the problem of information processing, the US Military doctrine designed a methodological process of investigation called the Intelligence Cycle, which is being used by organizations developing functional intelligence at strategic, police, or military levels.

• The Intelligence Cycle is composed of five sub-processes or phases

  1. Planning and direction to search for information
  2. Collection of data
  3. Processing the acquired data
  4. Analysis of Intelligence Product
  5. Sharing or Circulating the Intelligence Product

Unidad II. Information Policial

• Topics include the process of police intelligence, characteristics of the intelligence cycle, functioning of the intelligence cycle, and preparation of all requirements for intelligence

A. El Proceso de Inteligencia Policial

• As the organizations of the police works preventitive and repressing illegal acts, they are constantly receiving a lot of information from many diverse sources.
• Police information is the series of data that arrives to knowledge of the police institution
• This information has to be transformed through scientific investigations which determine the logical and factual value, so information is valuable in the process.
• It is known as Police Intelligence
• It involves a search, and production of intelligence, as processed data is extracted to find reliable information and provide it to the user.

Características del ciclo de inteligencia

• Intelligence cycle features:
  1. Reduces minimum expressions, where police can make decisions.
  2. It makes it easier for the leader of the police operations to give assignments and give specific outcomes.
  3. It always allows the leader to always use their commander/staff.
  4. It is used on time, allowing those to process the operation and do it as fast as possible with the right steps.

C. Funcionamiento del Ciclo de Inteligencia

• The intelligence cycles start to work for two motives
  • Constant monitoring of criminal actions and activities through organization intelligence.
  • Intelligence structure of those actions that provoke its interest in taking action and the affects it would produce on society regarding the safety of the public.
• It also could involve the petition of an officer, or by direct demand by the chief and staff.
• By regulation, the individual allows to ask for intelligence, as a required request, an intelligence officer sends a request to a chief, and searches the officer to fulfill that role. The required request must be granted depending who will be in charge.

D. Preparación de los Requerimientos Probatorios de la Inteligencia

• The police Chief prepares the RPI based on the information needed by the intelligence to be in compliance with their mission. In addition, the chief establishes the requirements needed for intelligence, and is important to prepare request and orders while acknowledging parameters.

1. Clues to the criminal activity in determine geographical areas must be used to find responsibility and prevent the actions.
2. With specific information from certain intelligence agencies, their potential is determined to plan for the breakdown, and a penal channel.
3. The location they suspect is their operational headquarters, the criminal organizations need to get information that will help them identify actions, and conspirators to do them.
4. Identifies a new process that allows one to be active and efficiently do so.