By Gail Tierney
CCSO Public Information Officer

The Citrus County Sheriff’s Office has a long history of making strides through innovative technology and sound law enforcement strategies.

And although community-oriented policing (COP) continues to exert an influence on the agency, the Sheriff’s Office is currently meeting, training and working toward implementing intelligence-led policing (ILP) as its guiding law enforcement philosophy.

Gail TierneyOriginating in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, intelligence-led policing gained global momentum following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The ILP framework is often defined as a business model/managerial philosophy where crime analysis and criminal intelligence are pivotal to an objective, decision-making process.

The intended results include crime reduction, problem-solving, plus crime disruption and prevention through strategic management and effective enforcement strategies that target both prolific and serious offenders. In simpler terms, ILP is a model of policing in which intelligence serves as a guide to operations, rather than the reverse.

Intelligence-led policing was originally introduced as a law enforcement operational strategy that sought to reduce crime through the combined use of crime analysis and criminal intelligence in order to determine crime reduction tactics that concentrate on the enforcement and prevention of criminal offender activity, with a specific focus on active and repeat offenders.

This approach emphasizes information-gathering through the extensive use of confidential informants, interviews with offenders, analysis of reported crimes as well as calls for service, surveillance of suspects, plus community tips or leads.

All of these sources undergo analysis so an agency’s command staff can determine objective policing tactics as they relate to enforcement targets, prevention activities and further intelligence-gathering operations.

While still retaining the central notion that law enforcement should avoid getting bogged down in reactive, singular case investigations, intelligence-led policing is evolving into a management philosophy that places greater emphasis on information-sharing and collaborative, strategic solutions to manage criminal concerns at the local and regional level.

Since intelligence is the output of analysis, it’s no surprise that ILP elevates the role of the crime analyst in police operations. In fact, the Sheriff’s Office crime analysts currently are undergoing intense training in the tools and strategies of this new paradigm. The agency is progressing through the three phases necessary to preparation.

• Develop an agency information management plan,
• Create the organizational intelligence infrastructure, and
• implement intelligence-led policing.

With the agency’s daily operations dependent on the output of the crime analysis unit, it’s important for its analysts to operate in an effective, efficient and timely manner while producing “actionable intelligence” that can be used by command staff to make decisions regarding deployment of personnel, budgeting and/or reallocating resources.

Since day one, Sheriff Jeff Dawsy’s management style has had as its fulcrum the elements of community-oriented policing, accountability, problem-solving and meeting personal as well as agency-wide expectations.

With the start-up of ILP, the service-oriented business Dawsy calls law enforcement will see a shift toward analyzing before reacting, which should make the day-to-day actions of his employees even more targeted, efficient and sound.

Gail Tierney is public information officer for the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office. She has been with the agency for 20 years. Comments or suggestions may be directed to Gail at (352) 341-7460, or gtierney@sheriffcitrus.org.