Interagency Cooperation …or Not

Katherine Newbold

Any discussion of interagency cooperation becomes a complex dissection of language, cultural ethos, jurisdictional authority, and political and operational issues. By the year 2000, law enforcement in the United States numbered more than 13,000 local police departments and more than 50 federal agencies with varying and overlapping mandates of intelligence gathering and security (McHugh, 2001). The intent of interagency cooperation is not a new one, with task forces operating as investigative tools since the 1970s and more prominently in the 1980s. Initial reports were mixed regarding task force effectiveness. State and local police agencies usually complained about the one-way nature of relations with federal authorities; more often, the complaints involved the actions of the FBI and the DEA. However, federal authorities did not fair any better in relations with one another. Each exerted control found in statutory mandates or through the control of informants and investigative intelligence. General Accounting Office ...

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