Community

Intelligence

hen it comes to community policing, many

units are sitting on the sidelines of the biggest problem facing urban police departments today: violent street gangs. As a
result, these community policing units are arguably irrelevant just when theyre needed most. There are several
reasons for this, but there is a solution as well, one that
can be used to optimize community policing efforts while
remaining faithful to the ethos of community policing.
The solution is to give community policing the mandate
and capacity to gather intelligence from the community
that can then be leveraged against violent street gangs.
This article sets forth four recommendations to achieve
this fix and get community policing units in the fight.

Transforming community
policing efforts to
addressstreet gangs
By John A. Bertetto

Why Are Community Policing Units on the Sidelines?

Community policing is problematic on its own.

Essentially it is a philosophy for organizing, not a strategy
in and of itself; the DOJs own definition reflects this.
While this allows law enforcement agencies tremendous
latitude in designing specific strategies to address their
unique needs, some agencies find the lack of clear strategy
to be confining or confusing, and therefore have difficulty
turning philosophy into coherent strategy.
Many community policing units have as their primary
mission a form of public relations. Bonds between police
and community members are strengthened in order to
enhance police legitimacy. Any informationin the form
of tipsthat citizens provide to police is a nice ancillary
benefit of improved police-community relations, but thats
not the goal. Given this bias toward public relations,
many community policing units have become repositories
for programs that do not fit the traditional model of anticrime operations, such as crossing guard units, school
resource officers, business liaison officers and DARE/
GREAT programs. Furthermore, even the best community
policing officers often find themselves marginalized either
because they lack training or because their agency doesnt

Reprinted with revisions to format, from the February 2015 edition of LAW OFFICER MAGAZINE
Copyright 2015 by PennWell Corporation

integrate them into operational planning and execution,

or both.
Finally, without a defined doctrine, replicating success
is difficult. Successes are treated as organizational case
studies, with agencies working to mine those officers
involved for insights, then passing those insights to other
officers with the direction to follow the script and achieve
similar, if not identical, results. While case studies are
valuable tools and should be studied for best practices and
insights, relying on case studies for a map to success is a
bit of placing the cart before the horse. It allows officers
to essentially stumble about until successes are happened
upon, then a review of the success attempts to determine
what went right. This approach is both ineffective and
highly inefficient. Case studies also assume that operating
practices can be replicated between communities, despite
differences in local culture or changes in times. Programs
successful in City A in 2004 cannot be replicated in City
B in 2014 without significant alterations to account for
community and temporal changes. If City B does not have
an operating framework already in place, such adaptations
are an order of magnitude more difficult.
How to Get Community Policing Units into the Effort against
PHOTO AP/SETH WENIG
Violent Street Gangs

To effectively combat street gangs, police departments

need better intelligence. Given the often local nature of
street gangs, it is vital that those collecting the information and processing the intelligence have an intimate
understanding of, and daily interaction with, local community members. Rather than create a new intelligence unit,
it would be easier and more effective to convert community policing unitswhich have pre-existing relationships
with the communityinto intelligence units. Without such
change, agencies are not getting as much out of community
policing units as they could.
Law enforcement agencies already have considerable
information on local gangs and gang members. This information is collected by field units through both their daily
interactions with gang members and arrests of criminal
actors and is stored in the arrest and information reports
they produce from these encounters. Community policing
officers will likely have such encounters as well. Where
community policing officers differ from their field counterparts, however, is the frequency with which they have
contact with non-criminal community membersschool
administrators, business owners, clergy, etc. Through these
interactions community policing officers may learn not
only about criminal actors and organizations, but can also
learn how gangs and gang members are perceived by community members, how they affect the dynamic of the community, and how police operations in the community will
affect local community members and their perceptions of
the police. Such information and sources are necessary for
conducting well-rounded assessments which will improve
overall strategic and operational planning.

The goal, then, is to leverage the contacts that community policing officers have with local community members
and leaders to create an effective and efficient local intelligence operations capacity. The following recommendations
are offered toward this end:
1) Include intelligence collection as a primary function of the community policing mission.
Rather than leaving the collection of information as an
afterthought, it should become the primary, or a primary,
function of community policing units. This should include
a mission statement specific to the community policing
program. By creating a mission statement that emphasizes information gathering, this effort moves from the
ancillary to the primary, and officers can actively pursue it.
Such a mission statement might read: The mission of the
community policing program is to establish relationships
with community members built on trust and open communication, and to leverage these relationships to collect
information to advance our common goal of reducing crime
and violence. Everyone involved in the community policing effort should be able to recall the mission statement,
and all actions taken by the community policing members
should align with the mission statement.
2) Select motivated and crime-savvy officers for
these roles.
Transforming community policing into a local intelligence unit requires that officers with specific traits be
selected. Officers should be highly motivated, knowledgeable of local criminal actors and criminal organizations,
capable of working in a team setting, willing to learn the
intelligence craft, and willing to work in close association
with both community members and local civic leadership.
Special details to plainclothes investigative assignments or
gang teams are coveted by many officers, and officers that
display many of the skills listed above are selected for those
duties. Police leaders, however, should give equal consideration to assigning some of these officers to their community
policing program.
3) Provide the training necessary to achieve the dual
mission of community outreach and intelligence
collection/analysis.
Intelligence collection and assessment are skills that
require training. Officers assigned to community policing
duties should receive training not only in community
outreach efforts but in intelligence as well. Far from a
nefarious art, intelligence involves such common skills as
active listening and asking open questions, among others.
Providing this training ensures that raw information is
actively collected by officers, processed into intelligence
assessments and written up in clear and actionable reports.
4) Integrate community policing into operations.
Community policing members should complete regular

intelligence assessment reports based upon what they are

learning through their interactions, and those responsible
for conducting regular operations should be copied on
these reports. This is critical for fleshing out the overall
intelligence picture. Community policing officers should be
included in the planning stages for all significant police
operations, including search warrant preparation. Doing
this allows for several things: First, it provides those officers executing operations the opportunity to compare their
intelligence with that gathered by community policing
efforts, checking for corroboration or contradiction. Second, it provides the opportunity for operations to include
considerations provided by community policing efforts,
adding context to conditions and allowing for operational

Conclusion

PHOTO AP/SUE OGROCKI

A narrow understanding of community policing combined with a lack of clear mandate and capacity for
directing community policing programs against street
gangs means that many agencies are missing out on the
opportunity to directly engage their community policing
efforts against these threats. By transforming community policing into both a community liaison office and an
intelligence operation, law enforcement can learn more
about how street gangs operate within the communities and include this intelligence as an integral part of
strategic and operations planning. This inclusion must
be more than just an organizational component, howeverit must be a cultural one. Integrating members of
the community policing
office into operations
planning is of no utility if those officers lack
the training to produce
quality assessments or
the assessments produced are marginalized
by those who receive
them. Proper staffing
and training coupled
with determined leadership are required
to produce strong and
replicable results. By
emphasizing
intelligence in a defined,
core-mission competency and then staffing,
training, and integrating intelligence assessWhere community policing officers differ from their field counterparts is the frequency of contact
the have with non-criminal community elements. Through these interactions, officers may learn
ments
into
operanot only about criminal actors and organizations but how these groups are perceived by and affect
tions, law enforcement
community members.
is afforded the best
caveats. Third, it allows community policing members to opportunity to leverage their community policing efforts
have a complete understanding of the operation and how against violence and crime by street gangs.
it is likely to affect the community.
Community policing members can then, after the opera- The thoughts, opinions, and strategies described here are the
tion has been executed, immediately convey needed infor- original work of the author and are not intended to represent
mation to the community, including disclosable particulars or speak on behalf of the Chicago Police Department, its poliLOM
of the operation, why it was conducted, how their expecta- cies, or its strategies.

tions were incorporated into it, what they should expect to
see as a result and what the police would like to hear back JOHN A. BERTETTO is a sworn member of the Chicago Police Department. He
is the author of Counter-Gang Strategy: Adapted COIN in Policing Criminal Street
in the aftermath. This is a vital part of the agencys overall Gangs, Countering Criminal Street Gangs: Lessons from the Counterinsurgent
strategic communications effort. Finally, providing regular Battlespace, Designing Law Enforcement: Adaptive Strategies for the Complex
written assessments, participating in operations planning Environment and Toward a Police Ethos: Defining Our Values as a Call to Action.
Officer Bertetto holds a Master of Science degree from Western Illinois University
and communicating agency messages to the community and a Master of Business Administration degree from St. Xavier University.
breaks down both the real and imagined barriers between
community policing officers and those officers assigned to
patrol or investigative duties.