 Intelligence-led policing is still in its early stages, and therefore lacks a universal conceptual framework that can be applied to disparate contexts as a policing paradigm.Implementation can also be difficult, because it requires police managers to “have faith in the intelligence process and in the judgments and recommendations of their intelligence staff.”

Some have also questioned whether the foundational ingredient - intelligence - has been properly considered, given that police and security professionals already have to contend with “information overload” from the huge databanks that have been built up in the intelligence process, and that increasing raw data is not the same as generating “knowledge” or actionable intelligence.As intelligence-led policing represents a move towards surveillance, it focuses on information collection and analyzing data.