Intelligence partnerships for a safer Australia—The journey of the Australian criminal intelligence model

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Model (ACIM) was formally endorsed by the Australian Crime Commission Board in September 2012. Adoption of the ACIM across the nation was subsequently reaffirmed by Australia’s Police Ministers in November 2012, marking a significant watershed for the management of criminal intelligence by Australian agencies.

The formal endorsement of a single model for managing criminal intelligence followed almost two years of developmental work, negotiation and agreement by intelligence professionals representing 17 Commonwealth, state and territory agencies.  While agreement by 17 agencies is of itself significant, perhaps of greater importance is that the agencies themselves represent three separate operating domains, each of which manages significant intelligence holdings. These operating environments are the policing and community safety domain, the serious and organised crime domain and the national security domain.

The simple vision statement for the ACIM—intelligence partnerships for a safer Australia—is reflective of an underlying agreement that criminal intelligence should be treated as a national asset, not as a commodity collected, owned and used by individual agencies. This enables a better balance between the concepts of ‘need to know’ and ‘responsibility to provide’ and creates an expectation that wherever lawful and appropriate, intelligence should be collected once and used often.

Ultimately, an enhanced flow of criminal intelligence within and across the three operating domains will lead to delivery of a ‘decision advantage’ for decision makers at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. The journey towards bringing the ACIM to life is still in its early stages. Critical success factors accepted by stakeholders include the need for improved policy and legislative frameworks to remove impediments to the flow of intelligence, improved technical capabilities to underpin each phase of the ACIM and further development of a culture of national intelligence sharing. In addition, there is recognition of a requirement to have robust governance arrangements in place to ensure individual agencies who ‘consume’ from the national criminal intelligence holdings are held accountable for contributing effectively to those holdings. The question is no longer whether to share or not share, it is what to share and how to share.