The Effectiveness of Fusion Centers



The Effectiveness of Fusion Centers

The new millennium started with a new challenge for law enforcement agencies. The issue of information sharing and interagency cooperation came under scrutiny particularly after the 9/11 terrorists attacks, when Al Qaeda militants targeted the World Trade Center and indiscriminately murdered over 3000 innocent people. This shocking incident raised many questions in regard to the security deficits that might have permitted those terrorists to commit such a suicide mission. According to (Maatta et al, 2010)the investigations that were held after the attacks determined that the lack of necessary information sharing was the major reason for the failure of law enforcement agencies. Particularly, the 9/11 Commission pointed out the lack of cooperation within the intelligence community and urged the government to make it a high priority to create an information sharing system.

The paper aims to discuss the effectiveness of fusion systems while focusing on core aspects of it.

The concept of a fusion center database is not new; they have existed for years under different names, but with a common purpose. That purpose is information sharing and analysis of data between different law enforcement agencies and under certain circumstances, with the national intelligence community. Originally, fusion center databases were considered academic in nature and only necessary under circumstances that required expansive information sharing. With the events of 9/11, fusion centers immediately became an endeavor for national intelligence sharing and placed local police departments on the frontlines of the War on Terror. A significant lack of information sharing between the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies is mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report as a possible reason for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks (National Commission, 2004). The events of September 11th forced many people to rethink how this country shares intelligence and how it disseminates information. Fusion centers needed to shift their purpose and practices, as many in the intelligence community believed they could do more; “After the events of September 11, 2001, President Bush stressed the need for military, intelligence, law enforcement, and first responder efforts to focus on the prevention of future terrorist acts” (Monahan, 2009). Fusion centers' missions have evolved from primarily crime prevention to include terrorist prevention, which is the focus of this research.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the development of a fusion center database by the Center for Criminal Justice Research and Training in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at Arlington. The name of the fusion center is the Texas Law Enforcement Resource Center (TLERC). The Resource Center is a password protected electronic repository within the University of Texas at Arlington domain for incident driven lessons learned and best practices papers created within the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Distribution of analysis papers based on actual incidents is provided upon request to Texas police chiefs and other leaders in the law enforcement and criminal justice community. The Resource Center also serves as a repository for city ...