Abstract
The intelligence fusion center looms large but opaquely in War on Terror lore, the hidden statecraft of law and order and big data. A seemingly unprecedented institution in the post-9/11 new Department of Homeland Security institutional geography, the fusion center is now present in every state and US territory. Brendan McQuade takes us from its earliest roots in the policing and surveillance of the 1970s forward, with fusion now scanning across municipal police departments and state police to the federal intelligence community and beyond. We might imagine it—as we are, importantly, not able to access it—as a “real time tactical operation intelligence center … that pulls together data from an array of cameras, gunshot locations devices and automated license plate readers,” as one Camden, New Jersey-based example illustrates—the site, McQuade argues forcefully, of “a dramatic pacification project” (p. 167) organized through big data. For instance, the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC, pronounced, of course, the “rock”), Brendan tells us, is far less Alcatraz and far more “outposts in nondescript, unremarkable office parks,” not unlike the detention checkpoints and probation/parole offices of an “‘alternative geography’ of official secrets hidden in plain sight,” (p. 175) a building situated in a flow of racial capital next to a Books-A-Million and a Michael’s Craft Store.
Pacifying the Homeland is part of a wave of much needed critical policing studies that at once echo an earlier era in the study of radical criminology, while also heralding the arrival of a new interventionist, unapologetic structural analysis of policing. This earlier era includes work such as Stuart Hall et al.’s classic Policing the Crisis but also, and in particular, the 1977 edition of an often overlooked volume on American policing, The Iron Fist and Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police. Its themes reverberate through Brendan’s work from the use of technology to escalate the police function to the formation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to political surveillance and pacification programs. His work is usefully situated alongside of David Correia and Tyler Wall’s, Police: A Field Guide (Verso), Camp and Heatherton’s Policing the Planet, Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, Micol Seigel’s Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police, Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, Marisol Lebron’s Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, as well as work by Travis Linnemann and Mark Neocleous to name only a few. On the backs of these books are endorsements not just by academics but by organizers and abolitionists. It is an interesting and exciting moment, amid the darkness, in the study of police—one many of us could not anticipate.
McQuade, like many of these authors, provides important frameworks from which to think about how we theorize the structural relations that make up the state and the police. In one of my favorite passages, he writes that the moment fusion centers become a “thing” or a “case” that needs no investigation or explanation, then all the meaningful questions (What is intelligence fusion? How did it develop? To what effects?) disappear (p. 44). One decade and a billion plus dollars later, no terrorist threats have been uncovered. But the fusion center proliferates, an institutional configuration that has little, if anything, to do with its origin story: terrorism. Rather, like policing, it is a dysfunction that creates discretionary autonomy to focus on localized pockets of perceived and potential social disorder.
Much of McQuade’s argument relies upon a term that is central to critical policing studies and McQuade’s project: pacification. A racialized class project that regulates the entire fabric of social order, pacification is, for McQuade, best illuminated through its chronic regulation of “the ill-understood and often illegible survival strategies of disarticulated segments of the working class” (p. 138), those “ragged edges of capitalism” (p. 139). “Poverty,” he writes, “is the fulcrum of police power, pacification, and mass supervision” (p. 161), a set of historical structural relations that, in the current moment, have converged into a workfare-carceral state. Here, McQuade tows the line on a growing critique of traditional reformist politics, overturning the conventional criticisms of policing and fusion centers. Dysfunction, mission failure, abuse, ineffectiveness, mission creep, and civil liberties violations do not account for the social fact that failure is its own success. A kind of political indeterminacy is central to the structure of the workfare-carceral state. As McQuade argues, if these arrangements can withstand their own internal contradictions, they may be all the more effective as a means to pacify class struggle.
So what might it mean to interrupt these formations? In his final chapter, McQuade turns to abolition and provides a brief summary of key contemporary moments and movements. He writes of Black Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, the Movement for Black Lives, and their platforms and reports. These campaigns are explicitly abolitionist. In other words, they seek to dismantle the security apparatus—police, prisons, the military, and intelligence community. They call for structural reforms: reinvestment universal public goods, and specialized programs to redress historical injustices. Hence, abolitionists fight “for non-reformist reforms” what Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba and David Stein define as “measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates” … to shrink the state’s capacity for violence”. (pp. 169–170)
Once we get the risks, the histories, the ceaseless and continuous convergent power of policing, then we must move to envision an otherwise. Hopefully, McQuade’s work takes off right here … what set of social relations must converge in order for the abolition of fusion centers, policing, the carceral state, and racial capital to materialize?
