Out of Bounds: Innovation and Change in Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysis

Since 9/11, national security agencies and law enforcement agencies are seeking to build unprecedented partnerships. The urgent need to identify and prevent potentially destructive actions by those who threaten to harm us as a nation on our own territory demands new alliances. New ways of thinking to achieve a more secure homeland are not only desirable, but also essential to our continued survival. This book explores analytical capabilities in law enforcement, with a focus on local applications. Along with those in the political and media arenas, the 9/11 Commission has not recognized that intelligence analytical capacities exist in state and local law enforcement, and little mention of this emerging resource exists in the literature of the war on terrorism, or the Long War. The purpose of this book is to inform the larger community of federal government agencies, including law enforcement, national security, and other interested entities, as well as the citizens of this country and beyond, about the intelligence analytical capabilities existing in local and state levels of law enforcement. This work challenges the thinking of the national Intelligence Community and its analysts, as well as the law enforcement community, by using an organizational change management process called Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry focuses on using imagination, the very thing found lacking in the U.S. Intelligence Community in evaluations of intelligence failures. The first stage of this process, the discovery stage, is incorporated into this work through success stories revealed in the author's interviews with analysts and experts who have contributed to real-world analytical work in law enforcement. Those success stories illustrate local law enforcement analytical capabilities.