Building Drug Intelligence Networks to Combat the Opioid Crisis in Rural Communities: A Collaborative Intelligence-led Policing Strategy

The goal of the proposed project to identify and disseminate effective intelligence strategies to reduce opioid risks by enhancing responses and enforcement outcomes in rural communities. The researchers seek to develop a data driven, sampling mechanism for mentoring collaborations between narcotics law enforcement agencies that promote innovative opioid drug market intelligence models through locally-controlled initiatives in jurisdictions that lack surveillance and interdiction technologies or advanced intelligence analytics. Research questions include: what factors best indicate opioid risk in rural places; what responses are communities making to the opioid epidemic, especially for police intelligence and information gathering; what intelligence-centered approach do rural police departments find most useful and how do they respond when primed to initiate one; and what benefit is yielded with new initiatives in opioid response and drug intelligence for rural police? They will first identify high opioid hazard communities using latent profile analysis of public health and other secondary county-level data in three States (Iowa, Missouri, and Pennsylvania). They will then develop and administer a short screening survey for law enforcement executives to classify opioid response into three groups: innovators, emerging response, and late adopters. Through site visits they will observe high risk opioid jurisdictions that are rated as innovative, and where comprehensive opioid and intelligence efforts are in place. Next, they will match innovators with departments that have fewer resources and responses to facilitate peer-to-peer mentoring in adopter jurisdictions. Finally, they will observe implementation of intelligence strategies, and track outputs with qualitative and quantitative data through site visits and other qualitative methods to document and evaluate efforts in partnership with state-level drug intelligence offices. "Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law," and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements - 2 CFR 200.210(a)(14). ca/ncf.