KirbyStuart and KeayScott (2021). Improving Intelligence Analysis in Policing. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-367-48111-7 (hbk)

This book is about a vital contradiction in the role of the analyst in the UK’s law enforcement agencies, especially public police forces, who in spite of large-scale investment in the National Intelligence Model have in large part ‘remained faithful to traditional policing approaches’ (p. 10). This contradiction matters because information, transformed via the analytical process into a set of intelligence products, is central to decision-making in modern models of policing. And yet, as the authors make clear, the police have a ‘love–hate’ relationship with the analyst, whose role is, of course, vital to the successful implementation of intelligence-led policing (p. 59). This book, then, is a study of the police’s failure to ‘do’ intelligence-led policing (see, especially, pp. 41–47), but it is also, and indeed is primarily, a book that sets out, optimistically and ambitiously, a vision of how law enforcement agencies can re-boot the role of the analyst in a manner that is fit for purpose at the dawn of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.