International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2015 | Page 124

International Journal on Criminology
resources and personnel. These are within one agency. Often a precinct next door
to another precinct experiencing similar gang crimes will have a delayed situational
awareness of current and emerging trends.
This is exacerbated when additional police agencies are added to the mix. When
supranational agencies (such as Europol or Interpol) enter the equation things get more
complicated, but the additional scope of knowledge is valuable and mitigates some of
the fragmentation.
Beyond interagency and intergovernmental complications, there are conceptual
issues that make developing intelligence to address hybrid threats difficult. Most police
agencies emphasize arrests so case support for individual cases takes precedence over
operational (multi-case, multi-area) and strategic analysis, and indications and warning.
The pressure is to make arrests and solve crimes, and resources are allocated to support
this bias. A similar pressure is faced with addressing current intelligence over future
potentials (early warning and strategic foresight).
Fusion centers (including terrorism early warning groups) were developed to
address these challenges. These developments have enabled better co-ordination among
agencies, but since each center has a unique signature and focus much of the fusion
emphasizes dissemination of finished intelligence products developed at national levels.
Some fusion centers address all crimes and hazards; others focus largely on criminal
intelligence and case support. Fusion can and should exist at all stages of the intelligence
cycle and much benefit could accrue as individual fusion and terrorism early warning
centers are linked into networks that facilitate meta-analysis and the “co-production
of intelligence” with each node contributing to insight, expertise, and area, and/or
disciplinary knowledge. 31 This type of distributed police-intelligence (security service)
collaboration—known as “global metropolitan policing”—could be a valuable tool for
address threat convergence among terrorists and transnational criminal actors. 32
Analytical Approaches for Hybrid Threats
As stated distributed intelligence networks emphasizing meta-analysis and
“co-production of intelligence” rather than simple information sharing may
help overcome the bureaucratic and conceptual obstacles (bias on current
operations, arrests, and case support) to developing actionable intelligence and context
on hybrid threats. These approaches require interdisciplinary analytical teams that
focus on “geo-social” analysis. Mapping criminal networks is an evolving intelligence
tool. Key elements of this tool 33 set are social network analysis including:
• mapping illicit networks (network configuration);
• mapping key hubs and actors by relationship;
• mapping enablers, fixers, facilitators;
• mapping illicit trade flows (smuggling, trafficking);
• mapping illicit financial transactions (investments, expenditures, money
laundering) and identifying illicit financial hubs.
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