Brendan McQuade, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision

Published date01 October 2020
DOI10.1177/1462474520915828
Date01 October 2020
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SG-PUNJ190026 389..412 Punishment & Society
Book Reviews
2020, Vol. 22(4) 553–569
! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520915828
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Brendan McQuade, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass
Supervision, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2019; 304 pp. ISBN:
9780520299757, $29.95 (pbk)
The intelligence fusion center looms large but opaquely in War on Terror lore, the
hidden statecraft of law and order and big data. A seemingly unprecedented insti-
tution in the post-9/11 new Department of Homeland Security institutional geog-
raphy, the fusion center is now present in every state and US territory. Brendan
McQuade takes us from its earliest roots in the policing and surveillance of the
1970s forward, with fusion now scanning across municipal police departments and
state police to the federal intelligence community and beyond. We might imagine
it—as we are, importantly, not able to access it—as a “real time tactical operation
intelligence center . . . that pulls together data from an array of cameras, gunshot
locations devices and automated license plate readers,” as one Camden, New
Jersey-based example illustrates—the site, McQuade argues forcefully, of “a dra-
matic pacification project” (p. 167) organized through big data. For instance, the
New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC, pronounced, of
course, the “rock”), Brendan tells us, is far less Alcatraz and far more “outposts
in nondescript, unremarkable office parks,” not unlike the detention checkpoints
and probation/parole offices of an “‘alternative geography’ of official secrets
hidden in plain sight,” (p. 175) a building situated in a flow of racial capital
next to a Books-A-Million and a Michael’s Craft Store.
Pacifying the Homeland is part of a wave of much needed critical policing studies
that at once echo an earlier era in the study of radical criminology, while also
heralding the arrival of a new interventionist,...

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