Assessing the success factors of organized crime groups: Intelligence challenges for strategic thinking

For more than a decade, there has been a shift in policing among the industrialized nations. Several factors have moved police services towards an intelligence-led, data-driven approach to risk mitigation and operational decision-making. These factors include the perceived failures of the community policing model (Deukmedjian and de Lint, 2007), the ever-growing gap between demands for police services and available resources (Flood, 2004), the continued expansion of information technology (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997) and the fallout from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Carter and Carter, 2009). In many places the police have moved from reactive responders to proactive risk managers of a security environment, emerging as “knowledge workers” (Brodeur and Dupont, 2006), integrating the ‘old knowledge’ of policing, such as criminal informants and information gleaned from suspect interviews, with the ‘new knowledge’ of policing, crime analysis and the surveillance of national databases (Ratcliffe, 2008b).