Please President Obama, re-evaluate the Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers because they aren't providing anything of value for policing.
So, urges Peter Manning, sociologist and author of the Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology and the Rationality of Crime.
He is commenting on a $254-million George Bush post9/11 initiative that has resulted in the setting up of 58 local and state centers across the US. Here, national, country and municipal police agencies are expected to collect and share crime data.
Fusion centers also include representation from the Homeland Security customs and immigration division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco.
Earlier in the spring DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the role of the fusion centers at the National Fusion Center Conference in Kansas City. She told reporters that "information and intelligence sharing is a top priority, and fusion centers play an important role in helping to make that happen."
Furthermore, she added, "In the world we live in today, it's critical for federal, state, local and tribal entities to know what the others are doing so each can operate effectively and efficiently."
But Peter Manning counters that fusion centers are primarily "reactive" and "redundant" networks which are gathering information that member agencies already have.
Talking to people in the fusion center in Boston where he teaches at one of the universities, he reports mixed feelings among law enforcement types for the concept.
"Because [the fusion centers] were put together very quickly and they are really not systematically evaluated I don't think there is wide enthusiasm. On the other hand it is federal money. It offsets other costs; it offsets other obligations. And so, it is welcome, to be cynical about it."
Plus, Manning continues, the investigatory and case orientation of the participating police agencies in the fusion centers makes them totally unsuitable for anti-terrorism work, supposedly the catalyst for their coming together in the first place.
"Most terrorism isn't easily identified by law breaking, because it is planned and talked about and organized [by the perpetrators] prior to the event," Manning explains.
He maintains that the fusion centers lack the capacity to carry out the kind of monitoring (i.e. the reliance of informants in suspect groups) that could lead them to prevent acts of terrorism in the US.
Does the absence of terrorism by al Qaeda or related groups with the US following the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington mean that the fusion centers have been a success? We may never know the answer, except it is unlikely from the sounds of things that they have played any significant role.
Furthermore, the fusion centers' lack of a mission statement or mandate makes it very hard to evaluate their success or failure in the first place, Manning argues.
These facilities, he reports, are staffed by young people who are sitting at their computer screens separately gathering information on items like gang activity, gun shots and other typical areas of police interest for their respective member agencies.
"They might meet every couple of weeks, something like that. But they don't share much information. What they share is verbal, trivial, of very little interest, because the particular knowledge that they have, they are not willing to share."
Oops, the traditional cops' reluctance to collaborate permeates the very facilities which were set up to help break down those barriers in the first place.
Also, the data being gathered at the fusion centers is similar in content to what the individual police centers represented here are already collecting on their home turf, says Manning.
The professor isn't calling for the elimination of the fusion centers, appreciating that no administration in Washington will want to conduct wholesale layoffs of a federal government financed function at this time. Instead, he urges the following.
"I'd like to see them reorganized massively and the funding be shifted over to other aspects of security where identiable goals could be set."
He wants the US inspector general to "radically re-evaluate" the fusion centers to determine their actual contribution to national security.
Manning suspects the Obama administration will take a second look at the fusion centers.
"I think it is going to be slowly cut back. But what will eventually happen is some way of institutionalizing the functions without the vast federal money going into it."
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