Brains and Bytes
Understanding the Intelligence Management challenge by Graham Pearson
While criminal behaviour and methods inevitably change over time, the importance of strong intelligence and the innocent victim are two of the constants of criminality.
James Kennedy, a British Rail Engineering gateman based at a Springburn depot outside Glasgow, became one such victim in 1973. After hearing the shots that resulted in the wounding of two of his colleagues, the 43-year-old Kennedy successfully tackled one of the six criminals targeting the company’s pay-roll office before being knocked out by a gang member. Upon regaining consciousness, he was shot twice by another gang member as he ran towards the passenger door of the van in a valiant bid to prevent the gang’s escape.
Just four hours after the security officer’s murder, the Glasgow Flying Squad had gathered reliable intelligence on the gang’s possible location, a tower block on the outskirts of the city. Despite launching a door-to-door search involving hundreds of flats, the Flying Squad narrowly missed the gang. However, they located the flat they had briefly occupied and collected considerable forensic evidence linked to the £9000 payroll theft – evidence which would eventually lead to the arrest and conviction of the gang members.
In 1973, what made this case unusual was the teaming up of Glasgow and London-based criminals. In regional Flying Squads in the 1970s (established in London and Glasgow only) we were used to dealing with local criminality caused by local criminals; individuals we often knew and to some extent understood. As a result, the scope of the Springburn robbery and murder investigation was almost akin to the type of international crime more common later in the century.
In such a case, as with any complex criminal investigation, information and intelligence made all the difference, ideally allowing police to catch up with, or even better, keep ahead of the criminals. In the 1970 and 1980s, as it had been in the decades before, this information and intelligence handling was largely done by a complex intelligence management system otherwise known as the human brain.
Investigating officers would inevitably have their own strengths and weaknesses. Their brains were the police ‘software’ of the day; some colleagues were like human Sat Navs, capable of locating any city street, others could impressively link licence plates to individuals or have a photographic memory when it came faces and names. These varied abilities, blended with personal experience and intuition, represented the forces’ best system of intelligence management.
One example of how such abilities and intelligence were utilised can be seen in another of my murder cases from the 1980s. The seemingly random night-time killing of a Hamilton shopkeeper initially stumped detectives, with the local community knowing little about the victim and offering no insight into a motive for the shooting. However, after a studying a map of the town, one enterprising local detective believed he had discovered a potential motive for the murder: a known local criminal lived on a street parallel to the victim, potentially making the incident a tragic case of mistaken identity. Believing that any attack on this individual would not be undertaken by local criminals, intelligence generated by investigating officers ultimately led to the names of two potential suspects being identified. A raid on, and the subsequent surveillance of, a Glasgow brothel led to the capture and conviction of the two suspects.
Again, this investigation revolved around how officers understood intelligence, qualified it and made sense of the overall picture presented to them by it. While historically this was done in a police officer’s mind, now it involves intelligence specialists and dedicated IT systems to help make sense of crime information.
A more recent case, in 2006, raised similar challenges to the cases of the 1970s. Following the kidnapping of shopkeeper Javed Mukhtar in the southside of Glasgow by a six-strong gang, the investigation initially revealed that none of the family present at the time had any criminal convictions. However, the discovery of the alleged involvement of Mukhtar’s son in VAT fraud led officers to believe that he had been the intended kidnap victim of the £2.5m ransom plot.
The 25-day Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) investigation (which involved 800 officers from a number of agencies and cost more than £2m) uncovered how the alleged VAT fraud had led to a contract being taken out by an English businessman on Mukhtar’s son – a contract ultimately involving former members of the UK armed forces and criminal gangster elements from Northern Ireland.
The success of the SCDEA investigation had hinged on intelligence we received that indicated that the Irish parties involved were potentially based in Paisley, outside Glasgow, and may well have been frequenting certain pubs and fast-food restaurants. Once the suspects were secretly photographed in a local restaurant (using an undercover officer’s mobile phone), the investigation was finally wrapped up after two members of the gang were arrested collecting £400k in cash left near an emergency phone on the M6, outside Manchester. In 2007, the gang members were convicted and given sentences ranging from three years to more than 12.
This investigation (the UK’s longest kidnapping case), requiring everything from covert surveillance, door-to-door enquiries, IT elements, financial checks and mobile records, highlights just how critical intelligence is to complex police investigations. The intelligence involved a huge amount of data and information relating to the crime, incorporating information on individuals from several countries with no criminal records and an established criminal network involved in VAT carousel fraud.
Technology is now a crucial element in intelligence management, with the information environment of 2010 presenting challenges linked to a national and international communications infrastructure which increasingly utilises internet protocol to enable users to communicate via e-mail, instant messaging (SMS), Voice over IP (VoIP), Wi-Fi networks, blogs and social network sites, in addition to the more traditional methods of communicating. As Bill Hughes, director general of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, recently noted, communications data and intercept intelligence are now viewed as key factors in over 95% of the most significant investigations managed by Serious Crime groups.
Modern communication systems also vastly increase the quantity of data police and intelligence services need to monitor, collect, analyse and disseminate. And when these investigations have an international dimension, forces will also have to work with foreign service providers and government authorities, all the while wrestling with the usual language and translation difficulties investigators face when tackling transnational crime.
Helping to collect, collate, manage and make sense of this mass of national and potentially international information and intelligence is also a challenge that the developers of intelligence management software have to expertly address.
For software developers, understanding the requirements of police forces and specialist departments is one key way of ensuring that software systems meet this challenge. And one way for them to achieve this is to develop relationships with forces and their personnel, working in partnership with them to develop tools that help officers and forces access information and make sense of it.
In an age when criminality is potentially more complex than ever before, police forces require systems that offer them the proper insight into the intelligence held; allowing them to see patterns and view information in a meaningful way which positively impacts on the battle against criminality.
The integration of existing databases and the refinement of information sharing practices are certainly powerful weapons in this battle, but the human element, involving that intelligence system known as the brain, will remain crucial to policing. I believe that this human element is ultimately where real innovation can happen.
Police forces will always need people to analyse and interpret the information they see before them, sorting through the dross and locating the real clues. And while information now comes in from a wider range of sources than ever before, making it harder than ever to bring it all together, that’s exactly what a modern intelligence management system should help forces do.