Community Intelligence

This article is part of the Counter-Terrorism Portal project of Spinwatch.

Community Intelligence is a term that is used in the PREVENT strategy as a word that describes the acquisition of "information that may be unspecific and ambiguous about local individuals or local places that cause concern or suspicion locally" relating to the threat of Islamist terrorism.

The term is used in the PREVENT strand of the government's Counter-Terrorism Strategy, in particular, relating to objective 6 which aims to "develop intelligence, analysis and research" about the threat of radicalisation and terrorism in Britian's Muslim communities.

According a leaked police document, the purpose of "community intelligence" is to allow the police to establish mechanisms that will ensure information on the Muslim community can be acquired and a Rich Picture understanding can be generated. Once the community intelligence is established, the police are in a better position to target their activities more meticulously.

The responsibility of developing community intelligence falls to Counter Terrorism Intelligence Officers, who aim to communicate with different elements/institutions in their command areas for the sake of raising “awareness of potential terrorist material [and] development of the Rich Picture. This intelligence assists the development of Operation Delphinus, the police operation which assigns different counter-terrorism tasks to local partners.

See Also

• PREVENT
• CONTEST
• Counter-Terrorism Timeline
• Scottish Preventing Violent Extremism Unit
• Project Rich Picture
• Prevent Funding