In Chicago, if you see a crime or worry one is going to take place, you can text a tip, photo, video or audio to the city’s Crime Prevention and Information Center, according to the Chicago Police Department. Then they send it on to the correct place within their organization.
CPIC also monitors the city’s Police Observation Devices, which were placed in high-crime areas in 2003 to record and thwart illegal activities in the city, according to Chicago police.
The center is so tech-savvy that it’s found a model to predict where and when crimes could happen, Minority Report-style, according to a story reported last Friday in the Chicago Sun-Times.
CPIC is unique to Chicago. And it goes beyond just community information and city police. It’s a fusion center, a place that brings together and acts on intelligence from various sectors to work for security in the United States. Chicago’s fusion center is different from the many across the nation. As CPD police representative Sergeant Antionette Urstitti explained in an email, CPIC has two goals, “violent crime reduction and terrorist threat assessment.”
In 2004, states began developing their own fusion centers to share intelligence on terrorism, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security issued a set of guidelines for starting and running these centers at any level, local, state or federal for the law enforcement, intelligence and private sectors.
The name fusion center might, at first, conjure an image of lab-coat donning scientists researching the next breakthrough in physics. As exciting as that seems, that’s just not the case. Instead of bringing together atoms, a fusion center brings together intelligence effectively at all levels.
The 9/11 Commission Report found holes in the information-sharing practices between agencies such as the National Security Agency and CIA. For example, the NSA had known about and tracked one of the 9/11 hijackers as early as 1999, according to the report, but this information was not shared effectively with the CIA, Counterterrorist Center, FBI or international intelligence.
Fusion centers are one of the government’s answers to the question of how to bring together different sources of information on potential criminals and terrorists.
In a statement to the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in September 2009, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said explained that the 72 fusion centers find and analyze trends to share up-to-date information between local law enforcement and DHS.
In this statement, she emphasized the role of highly local intelligence – such as what CPIC gathers – in this “two-way” communication. She said, “The work of state, local, and tribal law enforcement at the local level puts them in the best position to notice when something is out of place and warrants a closer look—which is often the first step to thwarting a domestic terrorism plot.”
The intelligence gathered by fusion centers is not without controversy, however. The constant monitoring and data-mining practices of fusion centers would lead to “nothing less than a total surveillance society,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union in a 2008 “Fusion Center Update.”
Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney with the Illinois ACLU, said the gathering intelligence is not inherently problematic, but there’s much potential for abuse.
Whether or not Big Brother is watching, one thing is sure: fusion centers have transformed law enforcement in Chicago and the use of intelligence across the nation.
