As we await the release of the White Paper, EMPAC Research Fellow and retired detective, Steve Dodd, offers his personal views about the importance of investing in neighbourhood policing in order to drive intelligence.
The importance of Neighbourhood Policing
In a democratic society each of us has a responsibility within society, which means we need to lift a hand to help, not turn a blind eye. Whilst indifference to communities abandons them, investing in them revitalises them.
Neighbourhood policing has a uniquely difficult task in maintaining the peace, nurturing rapport, and the protection of people & property. It is a complex balance of law enforcement, mutual assistance, respect and relationship building. So, whilst the Government’s forthcoming White Paper will set out its political ambition for policing in England & Wales I am here arguing for the particular need to invest in neighbourhoods.
Community Intelligence-Led Policing
Community Intelligence-Led Policing Methodology (CILPM) is a systematic way to imbed community intelligence within neighbourhood policing. CILPM as a resource for front-line officers engaged in the routine of undertaking daily tasks, to help them obtain community intelligence, (information, to be strictly speaking) without increasing their workload burden.
Done well, collecting such intelligence will make beat patrol life easier and help deliver the Safer Streets initiative operationally, with boots on the ground.
CILPM is designed around simplicity for ease of use, so as a single application each officer irrespective of discipline can access it and use it without delay. Additionally, it can be locally adapted to address the demands of the officer’s designation, be it rural patrol or city centre; from supporting a VAWG project to a night-time economy initiative.
The overriding strength of CILPM is that it sits within a Force’s Record Management System and not as an independent databank, so all information is accessible, enabling intelligence interoperability with neighbouring forces up to national distribution (at the discretion of the owning force) and even further via Europol.
Confidence and trust
A particular motivation behind CILPM is that of professional satisfaction and pride in the enhanced contribution neighbourhood officers can make to the productivity and functionality of the force by an improved sense of inclusion. Beneficially, a neighbourhood’s confidence and trust in its officers will be increased exponentially, as, so I see it, will the officer’s commitment to the individual communities within their localities.
CILPM is about positive engagement with local groups, institutions, business, academia solidifies community expectations. This is vital given opinion poll surveys are repeatedly stating a societal loss of trust.
Such a crisis of trust is not helped by the media, who push policing as a major feature, often thrusting the everyday negative actions of officers into the headlights of tabloid scrutiny. Likewise, politicians too often use law enforcement policy and practice as a weapon in their pursuit of power.
Word on the streets
Given we are now being prepared for changes to independence and regionalisation of police forces, the need for local intelligence must not be lost because of centralised structures. It is on local streets community information can be passed to the police as intelligence but this only happens when there is a local relationship of trust and confidence.
A local snippet of information can so easily provide a critical insight with an importance known only to the intelligence world, or where a corroboration was desperately sought. Better intelligence is a virtuous cycle, built on local police-community interaction, which can be actioned and result on improved detection, and prevention, rates.
Conversely, limited intelligence activity itself is a sign of a poor local relationship which then is accompanied by poor detect rates: trust and confidence then further declines. The CILPM comes into its own, as a cross over between law enforcement and building trust that helps deliver both.
Technology
A contention of mine is that criminal enterprise is taking policing by the hand along the road of technical development, proportionate to the rate of its own advancement. Yet even though AI is advancing quickly the role of local relationships in communities remains the priority if you wish to build trust.
Artificial Intelligence needs Community intelligence as a trust builder – regular contact, recognisable officers, local knowledge, delivered within designated duties. There are consequences in our present day thinking when (misguidedly) cost cutting initiatives close local stations, reduce foot-patrols and civilianise sworn officer duties.
Intelligence as a framework
Police intelligence is corroborated information and comes from communication, observation and local knowledge, which contextually can spot things that big data doesn’t always identify. The piecing together of snippets then offers its reward through insights otherwise missed. This is community safety through intelligence-led policing: a structured framework for information capture, recording, process, analysis and sharing.
CILPM is relevant to everyone, everywhere. Everyone lives somewhere; everybody eats, drinks, shops; at one point in their life, they had a relative, some have neighbours, cars, pets, associates, colleagues, club-mates, acquaintances, contacts, paramours, right down to the ubiquitous old school friend or even gang members.
What needs to change
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (2025) suggests that there is still significant under-reporting of sexual offences and Victims’ Commissioner, Baroness Newlove’s has raised concerns about the further erosion of victim confidence in the police. Given the bleak findings of the 2025 Annual Victims’ Survey the need for greater community interaction for reassurance and guidance for victims should now be a top priority.,
The Angiolini Inquiry (2025) calls for investment into neighbourhood police officers in order to identify, respond to and prevent sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces. The Inquiry recommendation 29c states: “The Government should ensure that there is a clear focus on identifying, responding to and preventing sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces in the job descriptions, training and guidance for the remodelled neighbourhood policing roles.”
We must do more and faster
Yet that Inquiry, of 219 pages, referred to neighbourhood policing only 7 times, and never mentioned intelligence once. So I feel the need to make the case for us investing more in neighbourhood officers so that they can get to know each community on their ‘patch’ by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, colour, even politics or football club; be it cultural, religious, socio-economic or race within the locality of a suburb, district, hamlet, zone, ward, area, region, county.
This means there should be an end to post code lotteries: for example rural communities often get forgotten when resources are focused on conurbations. The conversations that we need much more of, right across the country, will solve problems, address issues, give advice, de-escalate confrontation, provide protection and reassurance: prevent and detect crime.
Get the basics right
Community intelligence is listening whilst restoring confidence in the police by recording and reporting the often apparently insignificant. Neighbourhood officers approach the indistinguishable, engage the unknown, question the incomprehensible, notice the imperceptible, confront the violent, safeguard the vulnerable, all the while implanting intelligence to the heart of neighbourhoods.
Investing in PR to market police technology and AI tools may have its place but I would suggest technology and an endless succession of fact & figures about ‘how safe’ you are, when people don’t feel safe disenfranchises people more and leads to even more of a reduction of trust.
If the police can’t establish a relationship of trust and understanding with the public, policing performance and legitimacy will further plummet. Yet, if we do invest in neighbourhood strategies of intelligence-led policing we can still pull back from the brink of disaster: policing owes that to victims and their families, loved ones, neighbours and communities.
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