The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU)

The Chief Constables' Council, the senior decision-making body for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), ratified in January 2011 the decision for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) to become the lead force for the National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism (NCDE) and the three domestic extremism police units which sit underneath it.

The National Public Order Intelligence Unit was established to support police forces in managing the intelligence around the threat to communities from public disorder connected to domestic extremism and single issue campaigning.

It is responsible for the gathering and collating of intelligence from police forces in England and Wales to identify domestic extremism issues being dealt with by individual forces, and evaluating and analysing them to understand how they relate to other incidents across the country.

Because domestic extremists don’t work within police force boundaries, each force submits their intelligence to NPOIU, who then feed it into a database and analyse the information to identify common incidents, tactics and people committing offences across the country.

This information is then fed back to the police forces concerned, to allow them to see the bigger, national picture and join up their investigations, if appropriate.