Jerry Ratcliffe and the Case for Intelligence-Led Policing

Most policing, left to its own devices, spreads itself thin. Patrols drift across whole districts, investigations chase whatever lands on the desk, and effort is distributed roughly evenly across a city — which sounds fair until you notice that crime is not distributed evenly at all. A small number of places, a small number of offenders and a small number of moments account for most of the harm. Jerry Ratcliffe has spent a career insisting that policing should be organised around that fact: find the concentrations, aim at them deliberately, and check whether you made a difference. He calls it intelligence-led policing, and he is its most readable advocate.

From the beat to the lecture theatre

Ratcliffe’s authority on this comes, like Alex Murray’s, from having done the job first. He served as a constable in London’s Metropolitan Police, working the street for over a decade, until a mountaineering accident ended his operational career and redirected it. He took a PhD, moved into research, held academic posts including in Australia, and eventually settled at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he became a professor of criminal justice and one of the most cited figures in the field.

That biography matters to how he writes and speaks. He is impatient with research that never leaves the journal, and equally impatient with operational habits that have never been examined. His work sits exactly on the seam between the two, and his great theme is that the seam is where the value is: analysis that does not change a decision is, as he likes to put it, just expensive trivia.

The 3-i model

His 2008 book Intelligence-Led Policing — since revised and widely taught — gave the approach its clearest articulation. At its centre is a deceptively simple diagram he calls the 3-i model. The criminal environment generates crime and harm; analysts interpret that environment; they use what they learn to influence decision-makers — the commanders and officers with the power to act; and those decision-makers impact the criminal environment by where and how they deploy. Then the loop runs again.

The model looks obvious written down, which is rather the point. Its value is in exposing where real organisations break the chain. Forces collect oceans of data and produce reports that influence nobody. Commanders make deployment decisions that no analysis informed. Tactics are launched and never evaluated, so the loop never closes and nobody learns. Ratcliffe’s framework is a quiet indictment of all three failures, and a checklist for fixing them.

Testing it on the street

Crucially, Ratcliffe did not just theorise. In Philadelphia he helped run a series of field experiments that put the ideas to the test, the best known being the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment. Working with the police department, the research team identified the city’s violent-crime hot spots and randomly assigned officers to foot patrol in some of them but not others — the same randomised logic that Lawrence Sherman had brought to policing decades earlier. The targeted foot patrols produced a meaningful drop in violent crime in the treated areas, giving rare experimental weight to an old intuition: that concentrating officers on the worst corners, rather than spreading them everywhere, actually works.

He has been just as willing to report the awkward results. His work on predictive policing — the use of data to forecast where crime is likely next — has been notably sober about its limits, the modest size of its gains, and the risk that a forecast which merely sends officers back to the same over-policed neighbourhoods entrenches bias rather than reducing harm. That even-handedness is part of why practitioners trust him. He is selling a method, not a miracle.

Reducing Crime

In recent years Ratcliffe has put as much effort into communication as into research. His 2019 book Reducing Crime: A Companion for Police Leaders is written not for academics but for the inspector or chief who wants to know what the evidence actually supports on Monday morning. Alongside it he hosts the Reducing Crime podcast, a long-running series of interviews with police leaders, reformers and researchers that has become one of the most useful bridges between the two worlds.

It is the same instinct that animates the Society of Evidence-Based Policing: the conviction that good research is wasted unless it reaches the people making operational decisions, in language they can use. Ratcliffe simply attacks the problem from the academy’s side of the river, building the crossing from the far bank.

The influence, weighed

Intelligence-led policing is now so embedded that it is easy to forget it had to be argued for. Britain’s National Intelligence Model, and the routine talk in any modern force of “tasking”, “prioritisation” and “harm”, all draw on the body of thinking Ratcliffe helped systematise. He did not invent hot-spot policing or crime mapping single-handedly — that credit is shared across a generation of experimental criminologists — but he gave the practitioner version its grammar, and he has spent twenty years making sure it is taught in a way an actual police leader can act on.

If there is a through-line from Robert Peel to the present, Ratcliffe sits firmly on the modern, empirical end of it. Peel argued that policing should be restrained and consensual; Sherman argued that it should be tested; Ratcliffe argues that, between those two commitments, it should also be aimed — pointed deliberately at the small slice of the world where most of the damage is done. It is an unglamorous proposition. It is also, on the evidence, largely right.

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Sources and further reading

• Jerry Ratcliffe’s website and publications, jratcliffe.net, and the Reducing Crime podcast.
• Jerry Ratcliffe, Intelligence-Led Policing (Routledge, 2nd ed. 2016).
• Jerry Ratcliffe, Reducing Crime: A Companion for Police Leaders (Routledge, 2019).
• Jerry Ratcliffe et al., “The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment”, Criminology, 2011.