In a record­ed mes­sage on Mon­day fol­low­ing the coun­try’s sec­ond bloody week­end for the year, Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, In­tel­li­gence and In­ves­ti­ga­tions, Curt Si­mon, sought to as­sure the pub­lic that the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) has the sit­u­a­tion un­der con­trol.

DCP Si­mon iden­ti­fied “tech­nol­o­gy and in­tel­li­gence-based polic­ing” as part of the strat­e­gy be­ing used to tack­le the 11 homi­cides record­ed over two days.

It was not the first time that a mem­ber of the TTPS ex­ec­u­tive ref­er­enced in­tel­li­gence-led polic­ing as the ap­proach be­ing used to bat­tle the crime and vi­o­lence that con­tin­ues to spi­ral out of con­trol across the coun­try.

In­tel­li­gence-led polic­ing, com­mon­ly re­ferred to as ILP in law en­force­ment cir­cles — and not to be con­fused with a re­cent­ly dis­solved po­lit­i­cal par­ty — is a mod­el for crime pre­ven­tion and re­duc­tion that in­cor­po­rates da­ta analy­sis and crim­i­nal in­tel­li­gence for ef­fi­cient, ef­fec­tive law en­force­ment where need­ed most.

It orig­i­nat­ed in Great Britain, where it was de­vel­oped by the Kent Con­stab­u­lary in re­sponse to sharp in­creas­es in bur­glar­ies, car thefts and oth­er prop­er­ty-re­lat­ed of­fences.

The con­cept gained trac­tion in the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, ter­ror at­tacks and has been used by law en­force­ment and in­tel­li­gence agen­cies world­wide with vary­ing de­grees of suc­cess.

There have been fre­quent men­tions of that da­ta-dri­ven polic­ing con­cept since the tenure of for­mer com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith, al­though it might have been in use much ear­li­er.

How­ev­er, if the coun­try’s crime sta­tis­tics are any­thing to go by, the TTPS has not been able to make any gains against crim­i­nal gangs us­ing this ap­proach.

As im­pres­sive as it sounds to re­fer to an in­tel­li­gence-led ap­proach to crime fight­ing, the dev­il is in the de­tails—and Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher and her team have not been able to pro­vide any crit­i­cal de­tails of suc­cess with this strat­e­gy.

It sounds im­pres­sive to talk about a polic­ing mod­el that, if de­ployed in re­al-time, makes full use of ad­vanced da­ta an­a­lyt­ics, re­quires more com­mu­ni­ty in­volve­ment, and in­volves shared in­tel­li­gence and first­hand ob­ser­va­tion.

That doesn’t seem to be the re­al­i­ty on the ground. The crim­i­nals con­tin­ue to be two steps ahead of the po­lice, brazen­ly shed­ding blood with a de­gree of bru­tal­i­ty that sug­gests they have no fear of ever be­ing cap­tured and con­vict­ed.

ILP re­quires the po­lice to be proac­tive in as­sess­ing risk, but the TTPS re­sponse to the spate of killings be­tween Fri­day and Sun­day night is strong ev­i­dence of an en­ti­ty that is still re­ac­tive in its ap­proach and de­liv­er­ing very lit­tle in terms of crime de­tec­tion and pre­ven­tion.

DCP Si­mon, in his brief mes­sage, men­tioned some ar­rests and per­sons be­ing charged as a re­sult of those re­cent “in­tel­li­gence-led” op­er­a­tions but none were for the 11 mur­ders record­ed last week­end.

That should have been the out­come from those ex­er­cis­es had a cul­ture of in­tel­li­gence and col­lab­o­ra­tion, which is the hall­mark of ILP, tru­ly been in­cul­cat­ed in the ranks of the TTPS.

For now, it seems, ILP is more of an as­pi­ra­tion than an achieve­ment as T&T edges clos­er to the 400 mark for mur­ders this year.

The na­tion still awaits mea­sur­able re­sults to show that the bil­lions of dol­lars spent on na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and in­vest­ed in high-tech crime-fight­ing re­sources and the count­less strate­gies im­ple­ment­ed are mak­ing a dif­fer­ence.