In the Law Enforcement Intelligence Cycle, which step comes after 'collection'?

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Processing is the step that happens right after collection. It takes the raw information gathered from multiple sources and cleans, organizes, and converts it into a usable format. This involves validating data quality, removing duplicates, normalizing formats, coding and tagging, indexing, and linking items to their sources. The goal is to turn noisy input into a structured, comparable set of information that analysts can work with in the next stage. Planning and Direction occurs earlier, setting objectives and requirements; collection gathers the data; processing prepares it for analysis; dissemination distributes the finished intelligence to users. So processing is the natural bridge between collection and analysis.