About
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) protects Australia from serious criminal threats through coordinating a strategic response and collecting assessing and disseminating intelligence and policing information.
We have a unique role as an intelligence agency that supports partners to deliver on their law enforcement functions.
We use our capabilities to make Australia hostile to criminal exploitation. We illuminate the criminal environment and support our national and international partners to apply maximum pressure on the most significant transnational serious organised crime threats we face.
What we do
We work with our national and international partners to conduct investigations, collect intelligence
and furnish advice and assessments to combat serious and organised crime, including cybercrime
and national security threats. We are the conduit for sharing criminal information and intelligence
between all federal, state and territory law enforcement agencies.
To perform our role and achieve our purpose, we:
- collect, correlate, analyse and disseminate criminal intelligence and information
- maintain a national criminal intelligence database
- develop strategic criminal intelligence assessments and advice on national criminal
intelligence priorities - conduct investigations and intelligence operations into federally relevant criminal activity
- provide and maintain systems that allow information sharing for policing and law
enforcement agencies - provide nationally coordinated criminal history checks.
Our agency
The ACIC is a Commonwealth statutory agency, established under the Australian Crime Commission Act. The agency operates within the Attorney-General’s portfolio and is accountable to the Attorney-General.
The ACIC Board includes heads of federal, state and territory law enforcement agencies and key national security, policy and regulatory agencies.
The agency is headed by the CEO and our organisational structure includes the 2 groups below:
- Corporate Group – This group leads our delivery of national policing information and background checking services. It also provides enabling functions to the agency, including ICT, financial services, workforce capability and assurance, legal services, governance, strategic engagement and communication.
- Intelligence Group – This group leverages our unique intelligence collection capabilities to drive intelligence insights and disruption outcomes. Its responsibilities include examinations and covert collection capabilities, operational strategy, and the development of intelligence that delivers operational outcomes and informs policy outcomes in response to the threat of serious and organised crime.
We are also a member of the National Intelligence Community, comprising of 10 agencies that collect, analyse and disseminate intelligence information and advice in accordance with Australia’s interests and national security priorities.
Australian Institute of Criminology
Our CEO is also Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC). While the AIC operates independently, its high-quality research is important to our work. The AIC is located with the ACIC to ensure that criminological research and evidence remain central to law enforcement’s collective response to crime.
Diversity and inclusion
As culture is an agency-wide responsibility, we promote a positive culture that strives for excellence, enables personal and professional growth, values workplace diversity, model’s respectful behaviour, and achieves agency unity through collaboration and inclusiveness.