Objectives
- Identify the relationships between trust, respectability, risk, and white collar crime
- Recognize the differences between white collar and conventional crime offenders
- Recall the images associated with white collar crime
Introduction
The use of intelligence information, whether through formal or informal processes, is an integral part of any investigative effort. Essentially, intelligence is the process by which new information is added to that already possessed and made available to operational personnel when and where they need it, to educate investigators, to detect crime, trigger investigations, and to positively affect the course and outcome of an investigation. The intelligence process may be limited to the store of knowledge in the heads of individual investigators where information on suspects and their activities is retained and accumulated. Alternatively, the process may be formalized and structured into an intelligence system in which the accumulated knowledge of many individuals is written down, pooled and shared. The latter is by far the more useful model.
THE FUNCTIONS AND PURPOSE OF INTELLIGENCE
The purpose of an intelligence system, then, is to serve investigators as the single, best source of accumulated information on specific offenders and their activities. The underlined words must be stressed. Too often, the intelligence process constitutes little more than an accumulation of information, a formal dumping ground for disparate bits of data concerning individuals. No matter how formalized, such a process does not represent a bonafide intelligence system, for an intelligence system must be more than an accumulation of information. It must be the best available source of such information. And in order to be so, the system must have three basic characteristics. First, it must establish criteria by which information offered can be evaluated for inclusion. This is to prevent the inclusion of specious and unreliable information which would affect the reliance investigators can place in the system. Second, the system must have a basic organization and analytic structure into which information can be fitted and interpreted. Thus, new information should not merely be added to a system, but rather should be related to that already existing and serve to either augment, supersede, or invalidate previous knowledge.
Finally, the system must have a well-defined protocol by which conflicting information is reconciled and out-dated or invalid information is purged. Maintenance and upkeep of an intelligence system must be continuous in order to assure that it remains the most reliable and accurate information source available.
The use of intelligence systems in white collar crime enforcement is not as well-developed an art as in other enforcement areas. Partially this is because the white collar offender has not attracted as much attention as have traditional offenders, but it is also due in part to a misapprehension of the value