‘Playing the man, not the ball’: targeting organised criminals, intelligence and the problems with pulling levers

ABSTRACT

In efforts to combat organised crime, police forces have adopted variations on the pulling levers approach to individuals and groups identified with gun crime, drug supply and other serious offences. Once identified, those individuals and their networks are targeted for interventions from criminal justice agencies and their partners. When levers are pulled, criminals find their lives made intolerable by the attentions of multiple agencies. Identifying the right people for this sort of attention and the quality and currency of police intelligence are, then, key concerns for such strategies. But the choice of levers, and their implications also raise some difficult questions. The law is explicitly applied differently to those associated with organised crime than to anyone else. This paper reviews evidence from two ethnographic studies, one of police officers in three police forces in England and Wales, the other from a third-party policing arrangement in the Danish night-time economy. We seek to understand the ways in which levers are understood and used, raising questions about the efficacy of pulling levers.

KEYWORDS:

• Pulling levers
• proactive policing
• plural policing
• police intelligence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mike Rowe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2978-5222

Thomas Friis Søgaard http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1936-2346

Notes

1 For those wanting to get away from the spiral of violence and crime, a further aspect of the pulling levers approach is sometimes to offer protection, drug treatment, education and training and the like (Kennedy 1997, Braga and Weisburd 2012).

2 Following a high profile case in 1998 in which a complaint against the police was upheld for failure to notify a man that he was subject to a threat, the police issue Osman Warning Letters to potential victims. The letter informs the recipient of the help the police can offer.