An organizational analysis should provide for two things: a thorough and specific understanding of the targeted organization and the creation of strategies and operations that specifically target that organization. If these two purposes aren’t fulfilled, your analysis has limited utility.
Unfortunately, it’s all too common to see law enforcement agencies become embroiled in what can more correctly be called “categorical classification” exercises, mistaking these for organizational analyses. While categorical classifications can be worthwhile, their utility for providing an understanding of an organization that allows for specific strategies and operations that disrupt, destabilize and dismantle those organizations is severely limited.
Categorical classifications, like definitions, are only helpful if they serve to adequately categorize items into distinct groups. For example, street gangs have, for the most part, shared traits—but not all gangs have the same shared traits. This makes thorough categorical classification of gangs difficult. A criminal organization might fit well into two or more classifications. But as gangs proliferate, variety will increase. When this happens, more categories must be created or every organization is labeled a “hybrid network.” It doesn’t matter which route is chosen, the result is the same: the understanding of the organization and what makes it tick takes a backseat to making it comport to some predefined category.
To truly understand an organization so that specific strategies and operations that effectively target it can be created, you must use a questions-based organizational analysis. The questions used must focus on specific and relevant organizational and operational areas of the organization. The combined answers will provide specific insights into the organization. Furthermore, each area for inquiry has known methods for targeting, allowing for specific operations to be planned once the analysis is complete.
Areas for inquiry are:
• History;
• Objective;
• Operating practices;
• Structure and command;
• Financing; and
• Support.
History
A thorough organizational analysis must provide for a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s history. These questions allow your agency to develop an understanding of the organization’s culture and, when the culture is understood, likely future actions and reactions to law enforcement operations can be predicted.
Consider organizational culture as it relates to a sports team. We’ve often heard coaches or players on a sports team exclaim, “Let’s show them how we play this game!” Organizational culture is the identity and personality that drives the entity. For the criminal organization, relevant historical questions include:
• What identity has the organization given itself?
• What types of actions and endeavors has the organization engaged in previously?
• What have previous organizational leaders done?
• If the organization goes to “war,” what causes it? What stops it? What is the objective—destruction of a rival or submission and assimilation?
• What has the organization done in response to previous law enforcement actions/operations against it?
Objectives
“Objective” refers to the primary purpose of the organization—narcotics sales? Trafficking? Accrual of turf? Fencing? The primary goal of the organization must be determined, then targeted.
Operating Practices
Operating practices are those activities the organization engages in to achieve and/or support its objective.
What means does the criminal organization use to meet its organizational objective, and how do those individual means interact? You must understand the diversification in operations for the criminal organization (if applicable) and how those diverse operations work together toward the organization’s primary objective.
Structure & Command
Structure and command refer to the overall leadership and operating management practices for the criminal organization. How’s the organization led and managed? Does it have a single, strong leader or use a “board of directors”? If there’s a single leader, what’s that individual’s history? What kind of person is this? In previous interactions with rival organizations and with law enforcement, what kind of reactions has leadership shown?
By learning about organizational command, you can begin to anticipate and plan for likely responses to law enforcement operations. The more you can “think ahead” and plan for responses, the more you can manipulate those responses toward a specific outcome. Is a rank structure defined? Is there a definitive hierarchy in command? How’s the organization managed? How’s command maintained and how are information/orders relayed? When the structure and command of the organization is understood specific strategies can be implemented to interrupt or remove vital layers of that structure. The result is loss of communication, control and operational efficacy.
Financing
How does the organization earn money and process money? Is it self-financed or does it receive outside financial support? If it receives outside support, is it from being part of a larger criminal network or from outside sources with a concerned interest?
You must understand how money flows into, through, and out of the organization. This information can be used to target financial transactions, seize funds and bankrupt the operational payroll of the organization.
Support
All criminal organizations receive support of some kind. Criminal street gangs often rely on the tacit support of a population unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement. Determine what kind of support the organization receives. Is it overt or tacit? Where does the support come from—other criminal organizations, financiers or the local population? When sources of support are identified operations can be put in place that work to separate the organization from them. Strategies should also include operations that target public opinion or perception.
Driving It Home
Each of these areas for inquiry can be targeted with specific strategies and operations. Organizational culture can be mitigated. Operations can be manipulated. Organizations can be separated from their objectives, have their operating practices disrupted, their managerial layers removed, their financing frozen and seized, and be separated from support. Although any one of these efforts will likely disrupt an organization’s efficacy, it’s the fully integrated analysis and subsequent fully integrated operations that will ultimately destabilize and dismantle the criminal organization.
The applicability of this type of analytical approach with an example: the Medellin cartel. A categorical name for that cartel—narcotrafficker, narcoterrorist, criminal insurgency—doesn’t sufficiently assist law enforcement in either understanding the criminal network or driving operations against it. What you must understand to take action is that its organizational structure and command is dependent upon strong central leadership, organizational financing dependent on outside support and support from a local population that views the cartel as beneficial to their day-to-day lives. Law enforcement must attack the financing, funding and strong leadership. They must peel away layers of control by attacking links in the managerial chain and become actively engaged with community projects while pushing out a strong counter-narrative to the cartel’s public image.
This integrated analysis—in which the organization is “deconstructed” into areas for inquiry and the examined results are reintegrated—is different than a fusion analysis, in which multiple sources of intelligence are exploited. Rather, it’s completed after fusion analysis has been performed. To be a fully integrated analysis, law enforcement agencies ensure that each section of your agency has a seat at both the analysis and operations table while these efforts are being conducted.
Working Together
Inclusion of various groups within the agency in the analysis is particularly important in larger agencies, where the responsibilities for gang operations, vice, narcotics and asset forfeiture are typically handled by separate units. Each of these units provides specific subject-matter expertise that’s critical to both fully understanding a criminal organization and planning fully integrated operations against them. In this manner, each unit within the agency has a shared perspective of the criminal organization, resulting in operating plans being both complimentary and most effective.
Without a shared perspective there exists intelligence dissonance, which occurs when threat assessment or organizational analysis is conducted by two or more groups with differing results. One group conducts a threat assessment and determines that the threat poses minimal risk while another group’s assessment of the same threat determines higher risk. More commonly, one section of an agency is trying to gather intelligence on a particular organization only to find out later that another section has had that intelligence for some time. The result of intelligence dissonance is often ineffective operations and always strategic failure.
The simple act of having all relevant players sit together to engage in intelligence sharing, analysis and operations planning eliminates this.
Conclusion
The above framework for organizational analysis is just that—a framework. It’s incumbent upon you to gather the intelligence and perform the analysis. The wider the intelligence net is cast and the better the intelligence gathering and processing abilities are, the more effective operations will become.
Focusing a coordinated and fully integrated approach on organizational analysis and operations eliminates intelligence dissonance. Through a proper and thorough organizational analysis, operations target the key figures within a criminal organization or network. By removing these criticalities, law enforcement has the best and most efficient means to effectively disrupt, destabilize and, ultimately, dismantle those criminal organizations in their communities.
John A. Bertetto is a sworn member of the Chicago PD. He is the author of Countering Criminal Street Gangs: Lessons from the Counterinsurgent Battlespace and Designing Law Enforcement: Adaptive Strategies for the Complex Environment. Officer Bertetto holds a Master of Science degree from Western Illinois University and a Master of Business Administration from St. Xavier University.
