Fusion center hottest thing in law enforcement

Bizjournal
Posted : 2007-05-15

Inside a nondescript office building's basement, is a law enforcement tool of the state that experts say is becoming more valuable each year.

The Strategic Analysis and Information Center is located in Ohio's emergency operations center on West Dublin-Granville Road in Columbus. Known as an evolving "fusion center," it enables the state to work with all levels of federal, state and local government to extend the already long arm of the law.

In place since late 2005, the fusion center employs a mix of police officers, bureaucrats, analysts and technicians who work together to mine local, state and federal databases. The information they unearth is used to aid law enforcement agencies, local and federal, in criminal investigations.

"After 9/11, there was a definite need to share information and intelligence better," said Rich Rawlins, Deputy Director of Ohio Homeland Security. "Many states took on the task to bring together an intelligence focus in their states into one area."

The result was fusion centers.

In Columbus, the state's fusion center works with the FBI's joint terrorism task forces and with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Both departments have assigned analysts to work full-time at the center, Rawlins said.

The state built the center for $300,000, with primary funding coming from U.S. Homeland Security's urban area security initiative. The center is funded through federal and state dollars. Between 2003 and 2006, Homeland Security awarded Central Ohio more than $20.54 million.

That money has enabled Ohio Homeland Security to outfit the center's computers with a mix of off-the-shelf intelligence software programs and programs written by center employees.

In all, the center has access to local, county, statewide and federal databases, including state health, agriculture, natural resources and EPA databases.

At least 38 other states have fusion centers, Rawlins said, in many of the nation's larger urban centers.

That number will grow as information sharing becomes increasingly important, said Paul Wormeli, of the Ashburn, Va.-based IJIS Institute, a non-profit consortium of companies that specialize in the development of information technology products for law enforcement agencies.