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Prologue: Policing Camden’s Crisis

Intelligence Fusion, Pacification, and the Fabrication of Social Order

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was the largest reorganization of the federal government since the reforms following World War II. Since these reforms sought to improve intelligence sharing, they did not remain limited to federal agencies. Not only did state governments set up their own homeland security agencies and offices, they also worked with federal agencies, professional associations, and private companies to build a series of interagency intelligence centers: what is now called the National Network of Fusion Centers. At these secure and secretive government facilities, teams of analysts do the work of “intelligence fusion,” mining disparate data sources and “fusing” them together to create useful information or “intelligence.” In 2004, a year after DHS officially opened its doors, the department recognized eighteen fusion centers. Two years later, that number increased to thirty-seven. Now there are seventy-nine DHS-recognized fusion centers.¹

The first fusion center I visited was the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC, pronounced “rock”). The center is located at the sprawling New Jersey State Police (NJSP) Headquarters compound in East Ewing Township, an affluent suburb in a state that ranks as one of the wealthiest and most unequal in the Union.² Though the building is accessible to the public (the headquarters is also home to the New Jersey State Police Museum and Learning Center), a state trooper greets visitors, inspects their identification, and records their names. The newest addition to the headquarters, the ROIC is in the back of the compound. The building is impressive: a $26.7 million, 65,500-square-foot, two-story structure that can withstand winds of 125 miles per hour and earthquakes measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale. With on-site generators and photovoltaic cells, it can operate off the grid.³ Inside, a security guard sits in an enclosed booth to take the names and identifications of visitors. After I checked in for the first time, the state trooper tasked with coordinating my visit led me to a main room where the intelligence analysts worked, swiping his key card to access the elevator and open doors. When we arrived, the fusion center—the secretive intelligence facility I spent months trying to access—looked like any other office: men (and a few women) dressed business casual, a maze of cubicles on the right, a few breakout areas with conference tables on the left.

As the result of a grant-driven federal initiative that stipulates “baseline capabilities” but no binding standards, no two fusion centers are alike. The variation from fusion center to fusion center can be dramatic. The phrase—“If you’ve seen one fusion center, you’ve seen one fusion center”—has become clichéd within the fusion center community.⁴ Official secrecy obscures fusion centers, so the little public information available on a particular fusion center rarely details its unique profile. For these reasons, I arrived at the ROIC with a series of basic questions that could not be answered from the outside. What data are available and how are they used? Fusion centers do not store most of the data available to them. Instead, they negotiate agreements that allow remote access to existing databases. These partnerships are not limited to law enforcement agencies; fusion centers also make agreements with other agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles or private operators of “critical infrastructure,” for example, an electric utility or freight rail operators. They will work around privacy protections and buy access to the private databases of firms like Accurnit or Choicepoint, which provide a plethora of information on individuals with no criminal record. Analysts crunch this data with specialized software that produces individual “pattern-of-life analyses” or tries to divine the future by finding “predictive” correlations among these massive datasets.

Who works at fusion centers and how are they managed? Who receives their intelligence products? While fusion centers are managed by state or municipal police, they are staffed by personnel from many agencies. Some fusion center analysts focus on criminal intelligence and produce regular analyses of crime trends, while also providing case support, which can include extended involvement in an investigation. Others concentrate on “counterterrorism” and produce regular threat reports as well as more focused briefings on particular security issues such as threat assessments for large public gatherings. Task specialization is not the only factor influencing the focus of fusion center staff. Agency representatives assigned to fusion centers work for two superiors, the police officers managing the fusion center and their home agency supervisor. This arrangement can exacerbate jurisdictional rivalries and cause confusion. The public mission is information sharing, but, underneath, there is often a bureaucratic battle to control the resources accessible through the fusion center and the work that it does. On the outside, a diverse group of “stakeholders”—including many in the private sector—receive fusion center intelligence. The interests of all the parties do not necessarily converge. These competing demands complicate the work of fusion centers and muddle lines of authority.⁵

The difficulty of research alone does not explain why these questions remain largely unanswered. Most discussions of fusion centers do not include detailed assessments of any given fusion center. Instead, the abiding concern is the effectiveness of counterterrorism policy and its consequences for civil liberties. With so much attention on how fusion centers ought to work, few have examined their concrete effects or systemic connections to other institutions (such as the wider criminal legal system) and other domains of the social world (such as politics or economics). Consider the expert conversation in trade publications, academic journals, and policy reports. Police officers, professionals in homeland security and intelligence, criminologists, and others discuss the finer points of intelligence fusion, often as part of larger conversations on counterterrorism and intelligence-led policing. Some journalists, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other policy advocates make “critical” interventions in this expert conversation, but their impact is much the same: to stake a position in an elite debate about how to set up, regulate, or otherwise refine the work of intelligence fusion. While there are some scholarly studies on fusion centers, the majority of this work remains oriented toward administrative concerns of policy implementation.

Starting with these basic questions concerning the concrete characteristics of a particular fusion center provides the perspective to ask more important, foundational questions that are often ignored in favor of seemingly more pragmatic concerns: What is the work of actually existing fusion centers? How does the institutionalization of intelligence fusion change police agencies, the criminal legal system, and the wider institutional apparatus of the United States? How does it influence political life and the practices of government? How has the rise of fusion centers been shaped by other developments such as the Great Recession? How do fusion centers inform related shifts in policy such as the declaration of the “War on Terror” or the recent efforts to reduce America’s prison population? These questions expand the scope of analysis beyond the confines of policy refinement and civil liberties protection. They highlight concerns erased by the security discourses that pervade discussions of fusion centers. Rather than accepting the assumptions that the world is dangerous, terrorism is an existential threat to world order, and new security measures—including intelligence programs like fusion centers—are required to combat this exceptional danger, this study examines how fusion centers emerged and with what effects. Rather than asking how fusion centers can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, this study examines what “threats” fusion centers monitor and whose “security” they preserve.

This approach reveals that many claims about fusion centers are correct but incomplete. Professionals and practitioners can point to real improvements in interagency intelligence sharing and operational collaboration. At the same time, government auditors have good reason to call fusion centers ineffective and a wasted public investment. The fears of civil libertarians are not unfounded. Fusion centers are involved in civil liberties violations, including political policing, although not in the ways often imagined. All these claims offer glimpses into the operation of fusion centers, but they miss the main target of intelligence fusion: dispossessed and criminalized surplus populations. Now numbering in the billions globally, surplus populations are the economically redundant mass of humanity that is no longer needed as either workers or consumers and, as such, no longer protected as citizens.⁶ The growth of surplus populations is the product of global restructuring since the 1970s: the deindustrialization of the old capitalist core and the collapse of its welfare states in the face of a truly global and ruthlessly competitive world-economy. During this period, the United States built the largest prison system on the planet to warehouse surplus populations and otherwise manage the violent, wrenching social transformations caused by dramatic social change.⁷ While much attention has rightly focused on mass incarceration, a complementary set of arrangements, sometimes called mass supervision, also developed to manage “problem populations”—the poor; racial, religious, and sexual minorities; and formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people—outside of the prison.⁸ In the more recent period bookended by the dotcom crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008, intelligence fusion has gone from an unacknowledged feature of these punitive shifts in criminal justice to the central component of an increasingly visible system of mass supervision.

Placed in this context, fusion centers provide missing perspective on the current moment of ambiguous change in the US criminal legal system. Nationwide, the prison population is declining, in some states quite dramatically. Yet there has not been a clear return to the rehabilitative ethos of “penal-welfarism” that defined the criminal legal system for much of the twentieth century.⁹ Instead, contemporary changes center on a series of “alternatives” to incarceration that are not true alternatives but rather supplements to imprisonment. The recent round of reforms has reduced the incarceration of “non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenders” by expanding—and often privatizing—prisoner reentry and community supervision, establishing specialized courts that defer prosecution pending successful completion of court-supervised programs or simply reducing sentences to a year or less and shifting the burden of incarceration down to county jails.¹⁰

As prison populations continue to contract, mass supervision becomes both more visible and important. The result, however, is not a simple and straightforward substitution of incarceration for community supervision. Indeed, the use of probation and parole has not increased in every state with decreasing prison populations.¹¹ The intelligence capacities of state and local law enforcement, however, have expanded across the country. Today, there are DHS-recognized fusion centers in every state of the Union as well as Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; Guam; and the US Virgin Islands. The National Network of Fusion Centers, moreover, is just the newest addition in a series of police intelligence centers and other information-sharing arrangements that date back to the early 1970s. In this context, mass supervision, an outgrowth and extension of mass incarceration, helps maintain the stark—and starkly racialized—inequalities that characterize the United States. Through intensive surveillance, intelligence gathering, and policing, fusion centers help transform entire communities into open-air prisons. Although this concern is absent in the literature on fusion centers, this reality confronted me in stark fashion the first time I entered the ROIC.

• • •

One of the first interviews I conducted at the ROIC was with an officer who managed the fusion center’s computer systems while also overseeing the intelligence analysts working on violent crime. He was portly, jovial, and a bit eccentric. While many of his coworkers kept Spartan cubicles, his was decorated with posters and knickknacks, including a High Times magazine–style centerfold of a lush marijuana plant—I did not comment on that adornment—and a parody “Greetings from Camden” postcard, which mocked the city’s economic decline and outsized crime rate. During our interview, he showed me large social network analyses of drug networks. These sprawling link charts mapped out a web of relations: lines of authority in the distribution network extending outward to the kinship and friendship relationships and property (businesses, automobiles, guns) of the individuals in the chart. He was going back and forth between two charts, one that concerned a Camden-based network and another in nearby Bridgeton. While explaining how analysts made these charts and what value these intelligence products provided for investigators, he got them mixed up.

“I think that’s the Camden one,” I said.

“Oh yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t really matter, though. Look at them. They’re all the same element.” I looked at the black and brown faces on the charts and then back to him. I must have given him an expression of shock or dismay because he immediately started backpedaling. He laughed awkwardly. “After seventeen years on this job, you see a lot and you get cynical. It all starts to look the same. A lot of the cities here have serious problems, and Camden’s the worst.”¹²

The detective sergeant was right. Camden does have serious problems, and while these problems are more pronounced than most cities, they are not uncommon. Camden’s decline is an extreme example of larger processes: the deindustrialization of the United States, the rollback of the welfare state, and the increasing use of the criminal legal system to contain complex social problems. It took half a century for the industrial center that Walt Whitman once called the “city invincible” to become a poster—or parody postcard?—child of intractable urban decay. In the mid-twentieth century, Camden was home to 365 different industries that employed fifty-one thousand people—industries such as shipbuilding (the once famous Camden Shipyards of New York Shipbuilding), electronics manufacturing (RCA Victor), and food processing (Campbell Soup Company, which is still headquartered in the city but only employs a fifth of its former workforce of fifty-six hundred).¹³ By the early 1980s, the city had lost nearly thirty-two thousand jobs, including twenty-eight thousand seven hundred in manufacturing.¹⁴ Population collapse accompanied the economic woes, with a 40 percent decrease from its 1950 peak of one hundred twenty-five thousand. As the population declined, its complexion darkened. By the 2010 census, this beleaguered city of seventy-seven thousand was 48 percent black and 47 percent Hispanic. Over a third of residents lived below the poverty line. The median household income was a mere $26,000—compared to over $50,000 nationally and $71,000 in New Jersey.¹⁵

As the legal economy abandoned Camden, the drug trade filled the vacuum. In 2012, there were an estimated 175 open-air drug markets, or one drug market for every 440 residents.¹⁶ Of course, these markets did not supply the locals. “The suburbanites are generally the lifeblood to our open air drug market problem,” Camden’s police chief told a reporter.¹⁷ Several police officers I interviewed claimed the heroin trade in the Northeast US begins in Camden. “Camden has some of the purest heroin in the country,” one administrator told me. “That means we’re likely at the starting point, or one of the starting points for the heroin trade.” He went on: “It’s unbelievable who you’ll see. I’ve seen enough professionals in BMWs in the worst parts of Camden looking for heroin that I wouldn’t be surprised to see my own grandmother show up.”¹⁸ The Camden-based drug trade brings in an estimated $250 million yearly and, according to the same trooper, an individual “drug set” or a distribution team can easily make $20,000 in a day moving narcotics.¹⁹ This clandestine and criminalized trade is necessarily regulated by violence. In 2012, the crime rate topped out at 2,566 violent crimes for every 100,000 people, the highest in the country and 560 percent higher than the national average.²⁰

New Jersey responded to Camden’s problems with market-based reforms in all policy areas, including policing. In recent decades, the city’s tax base collapsed under the combined pressures of deindustrialization and white flight. In 2002, New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey (D, 2002–2004) signed the Municipal Recovery and Economic Recovery Act, which eliminated t he authority of Camden’s mayor and city council in exchange for $150 million in city rehabilitation projects. Camden County added $50 million and assumed control of the city’s parks, 911 emergency call system, and sewage. Governor Jon Corzine (D, 2006–2010) extended the government takeover until 2010. At the time, it was the largest municipal takeover in US history.²¹ The city manager envisioned a recovery based on public-private partnerships, including more development in the city’s downtown waterfront: Campbell’s Field, a minor league ballpark; Susquehanna Bank Center, a concert venue; and some luxury housing with views of Philadelphia. The New Jersey State Aquarium, the centerpiece of an earlier urban renewal project, was expanded, renovated, and privatized. Now called the Adventure Aquarium, the state funded the project to the tune of $25 million.²²

The state takeover failed. In 2010, the state restored municipal government in Camden, but the city still lacked the tax base to fund basic services. In the 2013 fiscal year, the city had an operating budget of $151 million, but collected just $39 million in taxes.²³ The median income and crime rates had not changed significantly. The state committed public resources for private development, but the expected private investment did not follow. The takeover and redevelopment created a small middle-class enclave between Rutgers-Camden and the waterfront, but redevelopment was weakly felt elsewhere in the city. Five million dollars in public funds did go to The Camden Home Improvement Program, which provided money to remodel and restore homes anywhere in the city, but this investment was far less than the $24 million demanded during protests organized by the Camden Churches Organized for People in 2005. Two hundred homes were remodeled, and five hundred more remained on the waiting list when the program’s budget ran out.²⁴ As Howard Gillette, the chief chronicler of the city’s travails, explains, “Recovery came to mean, as it has elsewhere in the county, an investment in physical structures over a commitment to people in need.”²⁵

Upon assuming office, New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie (R, 2010–2018) declared that “the taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t going to pay any more for Camden’s excesses” and cut $445 million in state aid to the city. The city immediately laid off 168 of its 368 police officers. The remaining cops responded by “calling in sick in record numbers, with absenteeism rates rising as high as 30 percent over the rest of 2011.” The next year, a record sixty-seven homicides officially gave Camden the highest murder rate in the country. The state’s withdrawal of funds was part of Christie’s larger effort to break the back of public sector unions and, where possible, privatize public services. While these efforts met stiff resistance in the education system, the gambit succeeded in law enforcement. In May 2013, the city disbanded the municipal police and replaced them with reformed Camden County Police, which, despite its name, only has jurisdiction in the City of Camden. While reformers envisioned consolidation, none of the surrounding suburban municipalities merged with the new “county” force. Even without consolidation, the reform accomplished its goal. It cut the average cost per officer from $182,168 to $99,605, reductions achieved through a 65 percent cut to “fringe pay,” which included pensions and health care. Camden County estimated it would save the city between $14 million and $16 million. By August 2013, Christie was holding up the Camden County Police Force as “a model” and calling on Trenton and Mercer County to follow suit.²⁶

While Camden struggled with fiscal shock therapy, the NJSP sent a “surge” of troopers to join a contingent that had been deployed to the city since the 2002 state takeover.²⁷ The surge included the deployment of the fusion center’s Intelligence Collection Cell, a small team of state troopers that, in the words of the senior supervisor at the ROIC, “are in the midst of daily operations and sort of embed[ded] . . . with these folks. . . . We’re actually going to ride along with you and, when you lock up somebody in Camden, we’re going to debrief them and interview them.”²⁸ These increased efforts to collect “human intelligence”—information gleaned from interpersonal relations—took place in a city transformed by surveillance systems: 121 cameras watching “virtually every inch of sidewalk”; thirty-five SpotShotter microphones to detect gunshots; new scanners to read license plates; and SkyPatrol, a mobile observation post that can scan six square blocks with thermal-imaging equipment.²⁹

At the time, much of this data was filtered back to the ROIC to the analysts working under the portly detective sergeant. While I was doing interviews at the ROIC, they had recently finished work on Operation Padlock. After nine months of investigative and analytic work, the ROIC provided the beleaguered Camden Police Department, NJSP and Camden County Prosecutor with the intelligence to launch a series of police operations targeting Camden’s prodigious drug economy. In seven weeks in August and September of 2012, the multiagency group undertook ninety-three targeted operations, resulting in 535 arrests for offenses including drug possession, weapons possession, and active warrants. The operation also led to the confiscation of $35,535 in cash and drugs with a street value of $44,300, the towing of nearly seventy vehicles, and the closure of a Chinese restaurant for health code violations.³⁰

This early interview with the detective sergeant offered a glimpse into a different reality that was not acknowledged in varied conversations on fusion centers. My original questions concerning surveillance, civil liberties, and public-private partnerships felt quaint. It recast “privacy” as a pedantic concern, an abstract formalism. I wanted to understand how massive investment in the name of security and counterterrorism produced a system of ubiquitous surveillance and aggressive policing that managed the social problems expressed so dramatically in Camden’s crisis. The intelligence gathering and related policing practices that were remaking Camden were not simply enforcing law and order. They were attempting to create a new city. The police operation and wider government austerity project were complementary state strategies to manage the long-term decline of Camden—and places like it. Making sense of this situation required a broader perspective that could hold policing, poverty, and political authority within one frame of vision.

PACIFICATION AND ITS PROSE

I conceptualize intelligence fusion and related practices as an example of what Mark Neocleous, George Rigakos, and other scholars call pacification, or the systemic fabrication of capitalist forms of order. The volatility and dynamism that define capitalism creates much insecurity: the vulnerability of the ever-growing masses of proletarianized workers (like the redundant, racially devalued labor warehoused in Camden); the vicissitudes of politics (revolt from below, machinations of elite factions); market shifts (the ebb and flow of business cycles, the movement of capital); and, most importantly, the fundamental structural precariousness of capitalist social relations (the silent compulsion of the market, which privatizes the means of subsistence and inscribes “insecurity” into commodified social relations with the demand that one must sell their labor for their life). The order of capital must be secured against these various risks. As an effort to critique security, Neocleous concludes that the modern world is an “order of social insecurity,” which “gives rise to a politics of security.”³¹

“Security” is a euphemism that obscures the political work of organizing and maintaining a social reality based on individualism, market relations, and the commodity form in the face of the “insecurities” produced by capital accumulation. It is, crudely, the way the routine work of policing maintains particular social property relations, even in the context of the most absurd inequalities. In Camden, for example, 15 percent of all buildings, some thirty-five hundred structures, are vacant. Meanwhile, there are nearly six hundred homeless people in the city.³² The plainly obvious solution—providing the surplus housing to homeless people—is politically impossible, unimaginable even. Instead, our self-evident norm is to use the most basic power of the state, bodies of armed men, to prevent unofficial access to private property. These perverse arrangements can only be naturalized as “common sense” because, as Rigakos contends, “security is hegemony,” or as Marx wrote in 1844, “Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.”³³

The critique of security is the effort to unsettle this hegemony and analyze security without being subsumed by it. In his reading of classic liberals, Neocleous notes that the “liberty” that is said to define liberalism presupposes security:

We are often and rightly told that security is intimately associated with the rise of the modern state. But we also need to note that it is equally intimately bound up with the rise of bourgeois property rights. . . . [L]iberalism’s conception of security was intimately connected to its vision of political subjectivity centred on the self-contained and property-owning individual. The reason liberty is wrapped in the concept of security, then, is because security is simultaneously wrapped in the question of property, giving us a triad of concepts which are usually run so close together that they are almost conflated (“liberty, security, property”), a triad found in Smith, Blackstone, Paine, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in various other formulations elsewhere. Thus as liberalism generated a new conception of “the economy” as its founding political act, a conception which integrated the wealth of nations, the world market and the labour of the population, its notion of liberty necessitated a particular vision of security: the ideological guarantee of the egoism of the independent and self-interested pursuit of property. It is for this reason Marx calls security “the supreme concept of bourgeois society.”

Simply put, the “liberty” engendered within historical capitalism is contingent on the security of private property. On this basis, the critique of security, like Marx’s critique of political economy, begins with a deep engagement with existing security ideology and its social context, “simultaneously unmasking ideas and rooting them within the context of class society and the commodity form.”³⁴

A central part of this project is the reappropriation of the term pacification from military jargon to analyze practical and historical connections among policing, warfare, and social policy as processes of order making. Pacification connotes the systematic fabrication of capitalist social relations. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed. Considering Camden from this perspective reconfigures this moment as the latest chapter in the broader transformation of the United States, as social formation, in the last forty to fifty years. How did Camden come to be afflicted by such insecurities as poverty and crime? What is the role of policing in pacifying—and possibly producing—these insecurities? What history informs the contemporary organization of pacification? What balance of social forces does it reflect?

Pacification is also a project with a world-historical resonance, something that is not lost on managers of state violence. In 2012, when Camden’s sixty-seven homicides gave it a murder rate 560 times higher than the national average, Police Chief Scott Thomson was sardonic, telling a reporter that the city’s violence fell “somewhere between Honduras and Somalia.” Reflecting on the situation, Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, a police professional association, evoked similar imagery: “If Camden was overseas, we’d have sent troops and foreign aid.”³⁵ Implicitly, these police officials describe Camden as a pocket of state failure enmeshed within the wealthiest and most advanced society in human history, a little piece of Mogadishu tucked away in a neglected corner of the Northeast Megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C. These comparisons are points of entry into what I call the prose of pacification: the shared discourses, forms of expertise, and practices that tie together the indeterminable wars on drugs (Honduras), crime/poverty (Camden), and terror (Somalia), boundless wars on vaguely defined social problems that do much to define contemporary political life the world over. The language used to define problems is also a productive force shaping social reality. The varied security discourses understood as examples of pacification—policing, military strategy, and social policy in general—share common historical origins in the creation of the capitalist world-economy and the consolidation of a social order organized around individualism, market relations, and the commodity form. When police executives evoke the language of the war on crime, they are unconsciously drawing upon deep histories of capitalist order making that color their perception of what the problems are and orient their action within a likely range of responses.

The deep roots of the pacification reveal the immense historical force evoked by security discourses and their formative power to shape present realities. Neocleous, for example, traces the genealogy of “pacification” far beyond its strong associations with counterinsurgency campaigns of the Vietnam War to the formative moments of the modern world. The term was first used in the sixteenth century to describe the necessity of governing “in peace.” It was used in two contexts: (1) the Edicts of Pacification, which brought an end to the French Wars of Religion; and (2) the “pacification” of Spain’s colonial possessions in the Americas. These events “are important because they are deep into the period of early global accumulation and the history of capital. . . . [T]hey are the point of departure for the period in which the insecurity of bourgeois order had to be secured.” Hence, the “peace” created by these pacifications was a particular type of peace. The Edicts of Pacification, in part, put an end to the decentralized violence that characterized medieval sovereignty and began the slow centralization of power and violence that defines the modern state. The pacification of New Spain, similarly, was a formative moment in the emergence of the capitalist world-economy. It marks a shift from naked plunder to a different practice of rule centered on “gathering information about the population, the teaching of trades, education, welfare provision, ideological indoctrination, and most importantly, the construction of a market.”³⁶

The pacification of the nascent capitalist world-economy was a continuous process. As Europe, the Americas, and West Africa became linked in a global division of labor, it created new commercial cities—new problems of urban insecurity: vice, crime, blasphemy, and the general disorder associated with the itinerant poor. These problems of poverty led the centralizing states of early modern Europe to undertake massive pacification projects, understood and organized in terms of the largely forgotten “police science” or polizeiwissenschaft of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. This pre-disciplinary discourse united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared project to construct what Patrick Colquhoun called “a general police system” to promote commerce and manage poverty. In this nascent science of social order, the critique of security has found the origins of public law, administrative science, political economy, public health, and urban planning.³⁷ By end of the nineteenth century, however, the meaning of “police” contracted to “the police,” the uniformed officers “enforcing the law.” This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital’s reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and varied administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of social life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old “police science.” In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses. They are examples of the prose of pacification.³⁸

The concept of pacification highlights these systemic interconnections.³⁹ Echoes of Colquhoun’s “general police system” are evident in the example of Camden, where police reform and economic development—today discussed as separate domains of public policy—are part of a common pacification project. Analytically and methodologically, the “prose of pacification” draws the conceptual and practical link between my primary research and the larger histories and processes that surround fusion centers. The prose of pacification is the productive integument of power and practice that links the aforementioned “wars” on drugs (Honduras), crime (Camden), and terror (Somalia). For example, one of the main security discourses animating fusion center is intelligence-led policing (ILP), which connects these wars through the circulation of ideas, people, and technologies. The chief proponent of ILP is Jerry Ratcliffe. A former officer with the London Metropolitan Police, Ratcliffe literally “wrote the book” on ILP.⁴⁰ He’s also involved in its implementation. In the mid-2000s, he advised the NJSP on reorganizing their Investigations Branch, adopting ILP, and creating the ROIC.⁴¹ A few years later, Ratcliffe was working at the behest of the US State Department’s Institute for Narcotics and Law Enforcement on a program to introduce Honduran National Police to ILP. This meant a shift from the old tactic of military sweeps—that is, mass arrests—to more individual targeting. To facilitate this transition, “the government of Honduras has developed a central intelligence center,” trained more SWAT teams, and created a national interagency task force led by the Honduran military with participation of the police, the Attorney General’s Office, and intelligence agencies.⁴²

Thinking of pacification as both a structured set of relations and prose to be spoken or practice to be enacted breaks the tendency to assume that particular discourses neatly and necessarily produce the orderly social relations envisioned by their authors. Instead, considering pacification as prose identifies the production, performance, and reception of “security” as an important moment to be considered on its own terms. Most security discourses do not describe reality as much as they help structure it through the redefinition or erasure of class struggle. The “prose of pacification” is a deliberate nod to Ranajit Guha’s “prose of counterinsurgency,” rhetoric that “serves a blinding function that renders . . . subaltern struggles . . . illegible, deemed ‘spontaneous’” and not the results of “motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the . . . masses.”⁴³ In Incarcerating the Crisis, a study of the political origins of mass incarceration, Jordan Camp recently invoked Guha to show how the “suffering that motivates rebellions, insurrections, and uprisings against police violence and mass criminalization are often poorly translated.”⁴⁴ To return to the anecdote that introduces this book, the crime afflicting Camden is not the product of an indistinguishable and unscrupulous “criminal element” but the product of social insecurity and an expression of class struggle.

In this way, the prose of pacification centers the fact that pacification presupposes politics: the resistance of active agents and the oft-obscured class content of routine state administration. Hence, in 2012, when Camden was reeling from Governor Christie’s withdrawal of aid and struggling to manage a spectacular crescendo of violence, the city spent $77,000 on overtime for officers to provide “security” at the Susquehanna Center, a concert venue and one of the main anchors of the middle-class enclave between Rutgers-Camden and the waterfront. While the so-called criminal element died in the street, the police made what the mayor’s spokesperson called a “deployment decision” to secure a large capital investment and the well-being of those who came to Camden as consumers.⁴⁵ By centering the normally mystified class politics—including the inchoate expressions of class struggle we call “crime”—entailed in “security,” pacification brings together all security practices as examples of “a proactive, organized, and systematic war strategy targeting domestic and foreign enemies and as a process that actively shapes and fabricates a social order in which capitalist accumulation can function.”⁴⁶

This approach moves the analysis of fusion centers beyond the limiting confines of the policy debate. It reveals the broader meaning of Operation Padlock and the massive intelligence system upon which such police actions are predicated. The DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers and the broader institutionalization of intelligence fusion in the United States is not a narrow topic with implications only for counterterrorism and security policy. Nor is it a legalistic matter of civil liberties and privacy protection. Instead, it offers insights into the changing administrative strategies that states use to pacify class struggle, administer poverty, and fabricate social order. While pacification highlights the issues obscured by other approaches, my research establishes the specificities of the current historical moment. The seventy-nine fusion centers recognized by DHS and the broader institutionalization of intelligence fusion are central, constitutive components of an increasingly prominent strategy of mass supervision. While mass supervision has long been an unacknowledged complement to mass incarceration, the dramatic expansion of the intelligence capacities of state and local police—during a time of falling prison populations—places empowered policing and ubiquitous surveillance at the center of mass supervision.

Mass supervision is an outgrowth and extension of the administrative strategies that constituted the state during the period of neoliberal globalization. This utopian project to radically remake world order largely succeeded, perhaps even pushing capitalism to its ecological and social limits. In the United States, many scholars and activists concluded that these changes produced either a workfare state, which imposed a new accord between labor and capital, or carceral state, which warehoused surplus workers, mostly racial minorities, who were left out of the new economic order. In today’s emergent post-neoliberal world defined by low growth, soaring inequality, and ever-expanding surplus populations, mass supervision helps shore up this workfare-carceral state and consolidate life organized around radical dependence on the market during a period of acute structural crisis. As the central component of mass supervision, the process of intelligence fusion mobilizes the decentralized surveillance capacities of state and private powers to render the complexity of social life legible as “intelligence.” The result is a potentially more supple system of social regulation that couples decentralized control with increased inter-institutional coordination across the state and private sector. In the short term, the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in the United States enables decarceration and an apparent rollback of the carceral state without addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. In the long term, it may be a novel strategy to pacify social unrest, necessary for a lasting reconfiguration of the state.

In the coming chapters, I will employ and elaborate the idea of pacification and its prose to confirm and clarify the central contention of this book: fusion centers and the broader institutionalization of intelligence fusion are a central component of mass supervision, a state strategy to pacify surplus populations in our nascent post-neoliberal world of low growth and soaring inequality. Pacifying the Homeland is divided into three parts, each of which is comprised of two chapters. The first part critiques security discourses and existing research that animate or otherwise make claims on fusion centers, while situating Pacifying the Homeland within conversations on surplus populations, the workfare state, and the carceral state. The first chapter, “Connecting the Dots beyond Counterterrorism and Seeing Past Organizational Failure,” shows how seemingly self-evident explanations for the spread of fusion centers—terrorism and counterterrorism—obscure more about intelligence fusion than they illuminate. Building on the introductory comments on the prose of pacification, the chapter shows how the concerns about counterterrorism, organizational dysfunction, and privacy miss the broader consequences of the long-term institutionalization of intelligence fusion. Instead, these administrative discourses are productive investments in fusion centers that shape the practice of intelligence fusion as much as they explain it. To this end, the chapter develops materialist methodology that recuperates the poststructural approach of discourse analysis to situate and analyze the relevant literature on fusion centers. This critical literature review clears the way for a different kind of comparative study, one that “incorporates” the comparison within historical time to illuminate the larger processes currently remaking the United States. The institutionalization of intelligence fusion in New York and New Jersey are not distinct “cases” that can be abstracted out of their time and space. Instead, they are mutually constituting “instances” that can illuminate the larger whole that other approaches tend to obscure.

To fully appreciate these changes, the next chapter, “The Rise and Present Demise of the Workfare-Carceral State,” synthesizes scholarship on the emergence of the carceral state—which largely ignores labor-formation and capital accumulation—with the literature on the workfare state, which is mostly silent on questions of incarceration, policing, and racial-formation. More specifically, this chapter theoretically develops the critique of security by demonstrating how processes of labor-formation, racial-formation, state-formation, and pacification interact to produce specific state-forms, developing this framework through an account of the emergence of the herrenvolk-welfare state and its transformation into the workfare-carceral state. This historical analysis provides the wider context to situate fusion centers within their constitutive conjuncture, a wider historical moment informed by decarceration, the politicization of “police-involved killings,” economic crises, and austerity. Understood within these parameters, it is possible to ask what the broader rise of intelligence fusion means for contemporary patterns of political order.

From here, parts 2 and 3 present the original research that provides the book’s core contribution. Part 2 deals with the way the institutionalization of intelligence fusion has transformed the state. The third chapter, “The Institutionalization of Intelligence Fusion,” details the exact mechanisms that undermine the dream of a seamless information-sharing environment and, instead, produce discontinuous pockets of increased intelligence cooperation and operational coordination. This uneven and conflictive intelligence system should not be simply dismissed as a “failure,” nor should it be understood as a natural outcome of the layered US federal government. Rather, it is a complex outgrowth of the workfarist emphasis on structural competitiveness and commitment to punitive criminal justice policies that produced mass incarceration. Following the comparative logic detailed in the first chapter, New York and New Jersey are not “cases.” They are formative moments that shaped the wider institutionalization of intelligence fusion. In the 1990s, New York City pioneered policing practices that would inform the eventual construction of the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. The subsequent spread of intelligence fusion, however, did not occur in a vacuum. The experience of New York City shows the iterative nature of state-formation. Social struggles within and apart from the state produced intelligence fusion as a coherent state strategy. The apparent success of this strategy, as evidenced in the transformation of New York City from a blighted city of high crime and postindustrial decline to a dynamic cultural and economic center, created a structural predisposition toward the further spread of intelligence fusion. At the same time, intelligence fusion did not simply diffuse out from New York City. The institutional apparatus of the state mediates these changes in ways that produced complex and uneven results.

The fourth chapter, “Policing Decarceration,” focuses on a series of now-commonplace “intelligence-led manhunts.” These ILP operations emerged organically from a shifting composition of social forces: chronic unemployment, and deepening austerity that reduces the prison system and elevates a less labor-intensive form of policing. Both New York and New Jersey are leaders in criminal justice reform, having reduced their state prison populations by at least one-quarter in the last decade. This apparent decarceration, however, has not been complemented by a renewed emphasis on rehabilitation or any reinvestment in criminalized communities. Instead, the contracting prison is supplemented by intelligence fusion, which enables punitive forms of decarceration. These changes are making mass supervision an increasingly salient and important state strategy. The central focus on imprisonment, which defined mass incarceration, is giving way to a more surveillance- and police-intensive mode of regulation. Specifically, warrant sweeps, compliance checks, chronic-offender initiatives, and saturation patrols supplement contracting prisons with expansive policing in an effort to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Even as aggressive policing complements reduced prison populations to produce a punitive version of decarceration, the commitment to workfare remains and in some ways deepens, as seen in the restructuring of the police agencies.

The third and final part of the book concerns the fabrication of social order, showing the novel reconfiguration of political policing effected by fusion centers and detailing the varied ways fusion centers and related ILP operations regulate surplus populations beyond incarceration. “Beyond COINTELRPO,” the fifth chapter, examines the contention that fusion centers are involved in political policing. While activists on the far right and far left both allege that fusion centers are the centerpiece of a new crackdown on dissent, a massive collection of released documents and my own interviews and observations reveal that there is no federally coordinated project to repress political activity along the lines of the earlier COINTELPRO program. Instead, political policing today operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. Reflecting the decentralized and competitive nature of this state-form, these intelligence networks are subject to a diverse set of political pressures, such as the external forces that shaped the divergent responses to different Occupy encampments or the internal struggles within the state that complicate the relations between the security apparatus and far-right movements. This patchwork of political policing is a complex and convoluted arrangement. Enhanced coordination creates organic opportunities for plausible deniability. It is hard to discern the leading actors and exact sequence of events. It also muddles command hierarchies. This lack of clarity is only partially caused by secrecy and the proximity of events. Increased political indeterminacy is built into the very structure of the workfare-carceral state. The current patchwork of political policing is much harder to expose and redress than COINTELPRO. If these arrangements can withstand their own internal contradictions, they may be a more effective means to contain class struggle.

The sixth chapter, “Pacifying Poverty,” reveals the way fusion centers and related police operations produce capitalist forms of social order. While activists fear government persecution, reformers bemoan waste and mission failures, and watchdogs fret about civil liberties, intelligence fusion subjects entire populations to constant surveillance and, often, aggressive ILP operations. These activities continue with little to no controversy because they target a group with almost no formal political power—the surplus populations warehoused in hyper-ghettoized communities, doubly segregated by race and class. This situation reflects the basic mandate of police power: to regulate poverty and fabricate capitalist forms of order. This conclusion becomes clear in light of a series of ILP operations that share a common convergence in the criminalization of “the moral economies of poverty,” the ill-understood survival strategies of those struggling at the bottom of the crushing inequalities that define capitalist societies. These police projects attempt to reorganize social relations on terms that support capital accumulation. Much of this work centers on the drug economy. Today, intelligence fusion helps police launch multiagency investigations into drug-related criminal networks. These operations attempt to regulate and, through asset forfeiture laws, tax the criminalized labor at the core of moral economies of poverty. When successful, they push the drug economy off the street and indoors. Here, landlord training, trespass affidavit, and narcotics eviction programs enlist non-state actors in the work of pacification, compelling landlords to police the survival strategies and quotidian behaviors of surplus populations. Finally, secondhand dealer laws provide police new tools to not only monitor and manage the market in stolen goods but also (re)produce the market and reaffirm the power of capital. These efforts continually (re)produce capitalist social relations by subsuming threatening forms of labor within the criminal legal system, enforcing legal forms of subjectivity, and constructing administratively legible market relations.

Pacifying the Homeland concludes with a reflection on contemporary movements and returns to Camden, New Jersey. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement formed after the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting and exploded into American consciousness following the 2014 death of Mike Brown and the subsequent rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri. The mounting deaths and continuing protests created a crisis of legitimacy in policing and the wider criminal legal system. In response, President Obama convened the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, bringing together police administrators, academics, and police advocates to articulate a vision for police reform. Moderate elements of BLM, such as Campaign Zero, endorsed the commission’s eventual findings. When President Obama announced the proposed reforms, he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to use the city as a backdrop. By 2015, crime rates in Camden had fallen considerably from their 2012 crescendo. The president attributed the success to their community policing programs and their use of intelligence.

While BLM moderates have endorsed these reforms, more radical organizations have rejected them as an effort not to police with the community but police through the community, selectively deputizing certain individuals to act as intelligence collectors and unofficial apparatchiks of the carceral state. Indeed, when President Obama traveled to Chicago to promote his reforms to the annual meeting of the International Associations of Chiefs of Police, he was met by street demonstrations and civil disobedience. A few days after, a group of grassroots organizations released The Counter-CAPS Report: The Community Engagement Arm of the Police State, an independent study of Chicago’s community policing programs that sought to recast the debate around police reform and challenge the reemergence of community policing. These battle lines have only sharpened during the Trump administration. The effort to co-opt and mollify BLM moderates and repair the public image of police with the media-friendly optics of community policing seems to be on hold, if not completely collapsed. Meanwhile, a new law-and-order offensive promises to reverse the modest reforms that began under the Obama administration. While these polarized politics have raised the stakes, they have also increased the stature of BLM radicals, a nascent socialist movement, and autonomous grassroots organizations who are working to abolish the workfare-carceral state and replace it with real alternatives that seek to transcend police power and capital.