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Marta Positò
Recent decades have seen a growing literature on intelligence-led policing as an “operational model” to enhance law enforcement in multiple sectors.1 Linked to the core issue of how to qualify the police—whether from an instrumental or a functional outlook2—the intelligence-led perspective stands out in emphasizing the importance of knowledge in performing policing tasks.
Traditionally anchored in Anglo-American countries, this intelligence-led approach has increasingly engaged European policymakers as well as scholars. The diffusion of this approach is due to several factors, primarily linked to the transnational development of serious crime, which requires more articulated, cross-border, and coordinated action from law enforcement agencies across jurisdictions. These elements have become driving forces behind a strategic shift in addressing multiple forms of criminality—one that favors proactive rather than reactive criminal policies.3 Structured through the experience of practitioners, intelligence-led policing may also serve to fulfill important objectives. Recognizing the need to go beyond criminal intelligence to address certain acts, it offers a framework for preemptive risk assessment inspired by social policing and the harm-reduction approach (pp. 75–77, 80, 85), in dialectic with traditional crime-reduction strategies.4
