Established in 1970, the CISC has a central bureau in Ottawa and ten bureaus in each province offering services to over 400 law enforcement agencies in Canada.
Level I is for police forces responsible for federal and provincial law enforcement which have their own criminal intelligence unit.
The purpose of the CISC initiative is to not only coordinate information sharing across jurisdictions, but to facilitate investigations into organized and serious crime across Canada.
The central bureau is staffed by Royal Canadian Mounted Police employees along with secondments from the following agencies:[3] The CISC has a strategic plan consisting of four pillars.
The second pillar also includes disseminating processed intelligence back to member agencies and measuring the "value added" of criminal intelligence through assessing feedback and determining the satisfaction of members with the service through a performance-measuring tool called the "balance scorecard".