On a day to day basis what I get from fusion centers falls into 2 category's: federal reports/bulletins and officer safety bulletins. I agree with your observations about the wins being tactical in nature, although I think fusion centers are missing a trick when it comes to linking these tactical events up to form a statewide strategy (where appropriate).

Quote Originally Posted by Sergeant T View Post
Fusion centers were supposed to address this to some degree. From the street level I never saw any evidence of that. For that matter, I saw very little evidence that they actually existed at all. They were the Roach Motel of information. To be of any use or utility at all intelligence would have to flow both ways across jurisdictional boundaries, and that seems anathema to just about every law enforcement organization's genetic programming.

I came to the conclusion a few years ago that police intelligence/crime analysis is always going to be in a rut to some degree because all of their "wins" are tactical in nature. (Granted, some tactical wins are pretty big, but none rise to the level of game changer.) You don't get a strategic win because as you're taking perps off the conveyor belt at your end new ones are being fed into the game on the back end. The philosophical underpinning would be Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. I always wanted a unit patch with this image..



And I'd have to agree hard with Slap. ChoicePoint (now part of LexisNexus) and the big three credit agencies wield an impressive amount of data and power. Anybody with an Android phone and a gmail account volunteers an incredible amount of information to a company we're trusting to be benevolent.