Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
and operational independence from the Federal Government; a cookie-cutter approach would be detrimental to the National Network.”74 This statement is not just a defensive reframing of the Senate’s criticism. It also gets at an important truth. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy, where efficiency is more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as “recommendations” and “baseline capabilities” in large working groups, which included the participation of a wide group of “stakeholders,” including the aforementioned police professional associations. “The missions of fusion centers vary based on the environment in which the center operates,” as one of these documents explains. “Some capabilities may not need to be housed or performed within a fusion center itself; instead, the center may rely on another fusion center or other operational entity to provide the capability. This approach is particularly appropriate, since one of the founding principles of the Fusion Center Guidelines is to leverage existing resources and expertise where possible.”75
These arrangements reflect a reorganization of political authority, one aptly cast as the workfare state, which, in contrast to the more centralized welfare state, seeks to promote innovation with competition. The next chapter discusses these changes at length. For now, it suffices to note that what most reformers, policy advocates, and academics systematically misrecognize as signs of failure are more properly understood as the variegated outcomes produced by the decentralized planning and competitiveness baked into the system. To better understand how these outcomes are produced, I examined two very different institutionalizations of intelligence fusion and ILP: the two adjacent states connected by the metro area that was the “ground zero” of 9/11. I compare New York and New Jersey to illustrate a larger structural shift. In both states, police—empowered by the increased emphasis on and investment in intelligence—are enabling a leveling-off of the prison population and a shift to more surveillance- and police-intensive pacification practices. The overall context of the workfare state clarifies the cumulative effects of intelligence fusion and ILP, while explaining the institutional differences between New York and New Jersey.
There is also an important historical aspect. The New York Police Department (NYPD) is the largest police department in the world, with great power and influence. It is a trendsetter that pioneered some of the techniques now being exported across the country under the rubric of intelligence fusion and ILP. Indeed, as the federal government began to advance fusion centers, New York State’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), an agency dedicated to supporting and training other criminal justice agencies, launched Operation IMPACT, a grant-driven interagency partnership between DCJS and the major law enforcement agencies in the seventeen counties that, together, account for 80 percent of the crime outside of New York City. The goal of IMPACT was to export New York City’s policing innovations throughout the state, including intelligence-led policing. As a result of IMPACT, New York State has what is likely the most robust state-level intelligence network in the United States: thirteen county crime analysis centers located throughout the state. These miniature fusion centers specialize in criminal intelligence and serve New York’s other urban centers. Between the NYPD and IMPACT, New York’s DHS-recognized, statewide fusion center, the NYSIC, has to compete for its mission space and niche. It has largely lost this battle. As a result, New York, an early innovator in policing, has a DHS-recognized fusion center that appears to be redundant and dysfunctional. In contrast, the ROIC has little competition and struggles to meet the intelligence needs of a densely populated state with high rates of violent crime.
In this way, the comparison between New York and New Jersey strengthens this book’s central claim that intelligence fusion and ILP are the central components in the reconfiguration of the state. A focus on just DHS-recognized fusion centers would present a false picture, where New Jersey is a model and New York is laggard. A broader focus, however, reveals that the nationwide attempt to institutionalize intelligence fusion through DHS counterterrorism initiatives is part of a larger structural transformation that some of the policing innovations in New York City prefigure. In short, this comparison shows a common outcome produced through different institutional means. It highlights a new configuration of the state’s security apparatus, while explaining the complex—and regionally varied—political and institutional transformations through which this change unfolded. It moves the conversation beyond hyperbolic claims about terrorism and a nearsighted obsession with failure and reform.
Instead, this study of intelligence fusion incorporates the comparison of New York and New Jersey into a larger investigation of the development of the state-form. A conventional comparison would produce “objective” knowledge about some abstracted “thing.” Consider, for example, Renee Graphia-Joyal’s comparison of four fusion centers to determine how interpersonal relationships and trust affect information sharing and collaboration. Each fusion center is taken at face value as a discreet “case” comparable to similar “cases.”76 In contrast, the comparison given in this study does not assume a given fusion center operates as an independent entity, a case that can be isolated and studied. Instead, it constructs a larger totality formed, in part, by different moments or processes of intelligence fusion. It compares the operation and institutionalization of intelligence fusion in New York and New Jersey in time: What resources do these intelligence centers muster? How are they used? How are these fusion centers institutionally situated? How are they connected to other agencies and entities? It also compares their development through time: How were these intelligence centers put in place? How have they changed over time? How have they helped define or refine the work of “intelligence fusion”?77
These simultaneous synchronic and diachronic comparisons avoid the common problem of abstracted empiricism. In one of the classic texts of sociological methods, C. Wright Mill denounced the “pronounced tendency to confuse whatever is to be studied with the set of methods suggested for its study.” Hence, he criticized “public opinion” research for assuming the existence of “the public” and conflating it with the statistical survey. This approach lost sight of the “problem of the public” as it developed during the transformation of Western societies from the collapse of the medieval order through the modern period up to the consolidating “mass societies” of Mills’s time. By the late 1950s, the relevant question was not, what does “the public” think? but, does “the public” exist? and, what relevance does its opinion hold when “men at large become ‘mass men’ each trapped in quite a powerless milieux”?78
Similarly, Graphia-Joyal’s comparison of fusion centers conflates her object of study with her methods, a four-part case study. The very problem of fusion centers—What is intelligence fusion? How did it develop? How is it institutionalized and with what effects?—is lost to her assumption that fusion centers exist as a “thing” or “case” that needs no explanation or investigation. Graphia-Joyal’s problem—like the questions taken up by criminologists, surveillance scholars, and civil libertarians—is much narrower. She asks how to improve information sharing and interagency collaboration at fusion centers. While her answer may help fusion center managers refine their operations, it will do little to advance “public” understanding of intelligence fusion or its consequences. In contrast, incorporating the comparison through history and within the present allows us to consider intelligence fusion as both a constitutive component of a state-form and a dynamic variable in ongoing processes of state-formation. In other words, this study places intelligence fusion within the broader social and historical context of the crisis of the workfare-carceral state and uses the analytic insights of the comparison to identify a shift in state strategy toward mass supervision, a more surveillance- and police-intensive practice of pacification. The next chapter details the necessary historical background to situate this comparison.
2. The Rise and Present Demise of the Workfare-Carceral State
The Lineages of the United States
Connecting the dots beyond counterterrorism creates a more complicated picture of fusion centers. It reveals that the apparent failure of the fusion centers recognized by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a shortsighted explanation that obscures a deeper history. “The terror attacks of 9/11 have created