Organisational barriers to institutional change: The case of intelligence in New Zealand policing
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Angus Lindsay,Trevor Bradley,Simon Mackenzie |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12486 |
Received: 19 July 2 021 Accepted: 12 January 2022
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12486
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Organisational barriers to institutional change:
The case of intelligence in New Zealand policing
Angus Lindsay Trevor Bradley Simon Mackenzie
Angus Lindsay is a PhD candidate, Trevor
Bradley is Senior Lecturer and Simon
Mackenzie is Professor,School of Social
and Cultural Studies, Victoria University
of Wellington TeHerenga Waka,
Wellington, New Zealand
Correspondence
Angus Lindsay,School of Social and
Cultural Studies, Victoria University of
Wellington TeHerenga Waka, Wellington,
New Zealand.
Email: anguslindsay@hotmail.com
Abstract
Over recent decades Intelligence-led Policing (ILP) has
become a central component of the attempts by New
Zealand Police (NZP) to engineer a transformative
shift away from ‘reactive’ policing to more ‘proactive’
approaches to crime reduction. ILP appeared to offer
an effective response to increasingly complex crime
problems, an expanded ‘mission’ and growing public
demand, by placing crime intelligence central to deci-
sion making. As part of an international study exploring
police intelligence, we conducted 20 in-depth semi-
structured interviews with Police Intelligence staff at all
levels of the police hierarchy.Our findings highlight five
critical barriers to implementing a successful ILP project
in New Zealand. We suggest ILP has not delivered its
promised effect of catalysing a major reorientation of the
modes of frontline policing or its delivery and argue that
this is due to the structural resilience of traditionalpolice
cultural reluctance to allow long-established practice
and procedural norms to be fundamentally changed.
KEYWORDS
intelligence-led policing (ILP), organisational barriers, police cul-
tures, police reform
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited.
© 2022 The Authors. The HowardJournal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:407–426. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 407
408 THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE
1 INTRODUCTION
Over several decades, coincident with the growth and intensification of social and political dis-
courses of public insecurity, risk, and anxiety, neo-liberal era police services have had to contend
with increasingly complex crime problems, an expanded ‘mission’ and growing public demands
for police services, all within a wider context of significant resource constraints (see Bayley,
2016; Loader, 2020). In the 21st century, police services have responded to these challenges in
various ways including the development of evidence-based, intelligence-led approaches to more
effectively manage crime, public demands and resource deployment. Over the past two decades,
intelligence-led policing (ILP) has become a central component of contemporary policing (Belur
& Johnson, 2018; Innes, Fielding & Cope, 2005; Sanders & Sheptycki, 2017), seeming to offer one
form of response to the rise of uncertainty and insecurity in the increasingly fragmented com-
munities of ‘late modernity’ (Cope, 2004; Innes, Fielding & Cope, 2005; Maguire, 2000). It is well
accepted now, based on observations of ‘actuarial justice’ (Feeley & Simon, 1992) and the crim-
inology of risk (Ericson & Haggerty, 1997), that securitisation has become a key characteristic
of ‘risk societies’ (Beck, 1992) and led to the development of classification technologies to assess
risks and protect the public from them. In risk societies, a central focus of criminal justice agen-
cies, including police, is the production of risk knowledge ‘for the management of populations of
victims, informants, suspects, accused, and offenders’ (Ericson & Haggerty, 2002, p.254), the raw
material for which is information. Police are among the key providers of such information and
their ‘knowledge-broker’ role has significantly increased the workload involved in their formal
remit (Maguire, 2000). New global threats including terrorism, online extremism, data theft, and
domestic and international cyber-related threats have further exacerbated the need to identify
and mitigate risk and threat (Belur & Johnson, 2018; Sanders, Weston& Schott, 2015). In turn, the
expansion of the scope and frequency of both routine and special surveillance carried out on indi-
viduals, areas and activities has expanded. Internationally, police utilisation of new technologies
and ‘proactive’ intelligence techniques to fight crime and counter threats to national security has
also expanded (Gill, 2000; Ratcliffe, 2002, 2005; Sheptycki, 2003, 2017).
New Zealand is no exception and here, too, ongoing concerns surrounding the political econ-
omy of policing amid growing pressures to more accurately assess and manage risk, pre-empt
crime, and utilise technology to neutralise threats are clearly apparent. Prompted by neo-liberal
demands to reduce government spending, over the previous three decades New Zealand Police
(NZP) have adopted a succession of different, progressively proactive, approachesto deliver their
core services (Bayley, 2016;DenHeyer,2016). Alongside the extensive pluralisation of policing
(Bradley, 2016), NZP have over time shifted from enforcement-led, largely reactive approaches to
strategies centred on Community and problem oriented policing (Den Heyer, 2016) with both now
operating within a broader ‘evidence-based’ and ‘intelligence-led’ model (New Zealand Police,
2017, 2018a). Moreover, NZP are on the verge of implementing a new policing strategy – Polici ng
21. Focused on the rank and file, it intends to fundamentally reorient the focus of frontline polic-
ing by solidifying the existing evidence-based, intelligence-led framework. Within this context of
ongoing reform, this study aims to interrogate the experience so far for intelligence practitioners
working at the coalface of ILP and assess the extent to which the sought-after transformation in
policing towards an evidence-based preventive approach has been achieved.
After highlighting the methods of study in the next section, this article briefly traces the
history of the NZPs attempts to engineer a transformative shift away from ‘reactive’ policing
to more ‘proactive’ styles of crime prevention within which an ILP framework has become
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