Fusion Centers – Where are they now? Part 1.

1. A little while ago I came across this thesis from the Naval Postgraduate Institute about fusion centers.  I’ve written about them before and my opinion of them is pretty low.  I do think they have enormous potential for either good or ill but generally have just been wallowing in oceans of mediocrity and bureaucratic self interest.  They are important to follow though because of their potential and so I try to keep current on their latest (d)evolutions. 

I’m not a total masochist so I didn’t bring the entire report with me to read on vacation, but just the most interesting looking chapter titled:  Analysis of Current Practice for Fusion Centers.  I recommend checking it out, even if you read nothing else because it raises some interesting issues (I suspect some unintentionally) that are in desperate need of discussion .

So, here are my comments on what I’ve read so far.  I’ll try to give enough context from the original paper to give you an idea of what prompted my comments without quoting the paper at length.  My perspective on this issue is based on work I did with one fusion center (rather extensive but more than a year ago) as well as regularly reviewing the products of several fusion centers.  I feel I have a pretty good picture of the analytical capability and internal operating environment of fusion centers generally and that is responsible for my generally pessimistic outlook on them.  That being said, I have had some contact with a member of one center who leads me to believe that there may be hope out there. We’ll have to wait and see.

Customer Identification: 

1. Who are the customers for fusion center products?  The thesis says that one survey “overwhelmingly identified investigators and law-enforcement as their primary customer” yet a discussion with analysts in those centers revealed confusion about who their customers were supposed to be and what they should be producing.  Fusion centers are often run by state law enforcement agencies, usually by people who understand how to run criminal investigations but have a weak grasp of what intelligence is and how it can be used.  As a result, fusion centers tend to flail about and can’t seem to claify what their mission is or how they intend on doing it.  What they do is hide their confusion in a bunch of management speak gibberish and throw around words like ’symatry’, ‘paradigm’, or ‘value added’ without having the slightest idea of what they’re talking about.  The confusion drips down to lower levels and before you know it, no one knows what they should be doing.
2. This jives with my experience where fusion centers, anxious to be the ‘one stop shop’ for every conceivable issue (so that they can stick their hand into every possible funding source) sell themselves as having a focus on ‘All threats, all hazards’.   Fusion centers don’t want to turn away any potential customer so they promise everything to everyone. 
3. Since fusion centers have a heavy investigative bent in their management and a weak grasp of intelligence they, de facto, overwhelmingly become case support focused in their production.  There are many ways to look at potential customers for a fusion center and as far as I know, very little time is spent on identifying who they should be before the center opens its doors (the best time to figure out what you’re going to do is before you start).  Are you going to target police makers, managers, line supervisors or rank and file?  Perhaps you want to focus on one component;  law enforcement, EMS, fire, etc.  Maybe it’s some combination of those.  Still, that needs to be clearly  articulated and far too often, it is not.
4. This is also a difficult problem because many (most?  all?) of the potential customers out there are unfamiliar with the concept of intelligence in their operations and decision making processes and so fusion centers have to take it upon themselves to educate potential customers about what they can and can’t do and given #1 above, that’s a pretty tall order if the leadership doesn’t know itself.

Tasking:

• The author cites an unnamed analyst who seems brilliant and I really want to buy him/her a beer.  In one quote (s)he says:
  • “One of the biggest problems facing fusion centers is getting law enforcement administrators to establish standing requirements.  Law enforcement administrators cannot become effecient consumers of intelligence if they do not take an active part in establishing what requirements are established or why.  The standing requirements of a fusion center should not be established in an ad hoc fashion.” 
• I think law enforcement is loath to establish standing requirements, in part, because they fear repurcussions if they don’t pick the ‘right’ requirements.  What happens if some criminal or  crime type grabs the headlines and sparks fear in the population and it turns out that our brave little fusion center wasn’t tracking that particular threat.  I think the perception is that could end a career.  Better to not establish any priorities so that when times are good you can claim to be tracking every possible threat to mankind and when times are bad you can hope no one will notice.

I don’t want this post to get too unwieldy so I’m going to have to break it up.  Stay tuned for part 2.