Feds and local police, one and the same
"I saw with my own eyes MPD and Hennepin County Sheriffs protect ICE’s flank while ICE fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades at the resistance in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Alex Pretti. "
Three thousand federal agents tasked with terrorizing Minneapolis are said to be on the path towards withdrawal. Meanwhile, Wired and other outlets report that ICE is purchasing new or expanding bureaucratic office spaces and their network of concentration camps “at breakneck speeds.” The spectacle of the Fed’s occupation of Minneapolis obscures immigration enforcement operations all over the country, and also clarifies basic questions for working class and oppressed communities to understand our terrain of struggle. In particular, the actions of police and the Democratic Party from top to bottom are exposing who exactly these organizations work for.
Kieran Frazier Knutson, president of CWA 7250 in Minneapolis put it clearly in a Facebook post: “[T]he mayor, the governor, and other officials—described ICE as “an occupation” who they said should ‘get the fuck out,’ but actually began working with ICE in an ‘unprecedented level of cooperation’ including specifically protecting ICE agents and the Whipple Federal Building from the resistance.
“I saw with my own eyes MPD and Hennepin County Sheriffs protect ICE’s flank while ICE fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades at the resistance in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Alex Pretti. The MPD and Sheriffs Dept. later opened a corridor (using mace, tear gas, and “non-lethal” ammo, themselves) for the ICE killers to escape.”
These instances of collaboration between Democratic Party officials and local and state police, and the Feds are no accident. The Democratic Party is completely integrated with the ruling class’s repressive apparatus. Local police are, in reality, the big capitalists’ strongest and most active foot soldiers. The vast majority of the 1300+ annual reported police murders are not committed by the Feds.
Intelligence fusion and an infinity of cops
The modern police apparatus in the United States is based on the principles of intelligence fusion and intelligence-led policing. These are fancy ways of saying that all of the various police agencies are in communication and organization with each other using methods of mass surveillance, informant networks, and community engagement to enforce capitalist social order. The ways that this communication and organization is organized are concrete and easy to identify, but largely undiscussed by politicians and the mainstream press. They are also more expansive than the police, or even the state, including in their networks large corporations’ and other private surveillance as well as executives and other elites.
Basic means of “intelligence fusion” include policing task forces and fusion centers. Federal task forces include the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), the DEA/DHS’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, various ATF programs, the U.S. Marshal’s Fugitive Task Forces, and many other similar bodies. To give an example of the scope of federal task forces, there are over 200 JTTFs alone, with field offices around the country. Fusion centers are very similar to task forces, but in theory are supposed to coordinate between them as well as organize information sharing and operational coordination between the local and federal police and the “intelligence community.” The “intelligence community” is a nice way of saying the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and other spy agencies carrying out the dirty deeds of U.S. imperialism.
The way that both fusion centers and federal task forces are structured is that they have participating officers from federal and local police departments as well as working agreements for data and information sharing. Any information received by a task force can be assumed to be available to not only the entire policing system, but also the military. Many task forces and fusion centers include National Guard and NORTHCOM operatives in their ranks.
The general relationship between local and federal police is not new. One example is what could be considered the first “biometric database.” That was organized by the National Bureau of Criminal Identification (NBCI), a private agency initiated by the National Police Chiefs Union (now known as the International Association of Chiefs of Police) in 1896. The NBCI compiled a broad range photographs of criminal suspects, including fingerprints. When the Bureau of Investigations (precursor to the FBI) was formed in 1907, the NBCI and its records were folded up into the new agency. Thus, it was not the actions of the federal government but rather the collective action of local police chiefs that created the bureaucratic home for mass surveillance by the federal government.
Today, private organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, police foundations, and business interest groups work with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to structure and set policy around mass surveillance and policing strategy. There is nothing particularly exceptional about any of this, and the fact that there are particular organizations which propose policy and strategy should not be taken to mean that they are somehow separate from the capitalist state. They are simply the groups assigned by the ruling class to organize repression and surveillance on behalf of the whole ruling class.
These high-tech surveillance networks take the form of public-private partnerships between big businesses, community organizations, local police, and the federal agencies. The most high-profile case is that of Flock Automated License Plate Readers, which are utilized not only by local and state police agencies but also “private” organizations like HOAs. All of the private ALPRs, as well as video and other electronic surveillance, usually are linked to local and federal police programs that join together huge amounts of data.
The Atlanta Police Foundation’s Operation Shield, for example, is a “network of more than 20,000 public and private sector cameras, [which] monitors Atlanta’s neighborhoods, business centers, major public spaces, and thoroughfares. The cameras are integrated into [Atlanta Police Department]’s Video Surveillance Center which provides real-time monitoring and dispatching of police to trouble spots. Some 80% of the cost is borne by the private sector.” Similar programs, often under the name Connect [City], are run all over the country.
Crisis management and bourgeois law and order
Fusion centers and federal task forces have been developed over long periods of time and include in their genesis the experiences of Indigenous genocide, anti-Black terror gangs, organized violent strike breaking, and colonial occupation. They are based on a longstanding strategy that has come to be known in bourgeois circles as “counter-insurgency.” The basic idea is to identify, isolate, and “neutralize” potential social movement leaders that can organize working and oppressed people.
As CIA director Allen Dulles stated in a 1955 speech at a meeting of the International Association of Police Chiefs in Philadelphia, in the view of the CIA, law enforcement “must generally be the first line of defense … to ferret out agents of subversion… and maintain domestic peace … without … calling on military forces to deal with open revolt.” He would go on to say that “When I need help … [domestically] I turn to the [FBI], and on the local scene to many of you for help and assistance.”
Expanding police powers always is fundamentally aimed at attacking the organization of Black and other oppressed and working people. Often this is justified through capitalist moral panics around “crime” and/or “terrorism.” FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces were initiated in part due to the failure of J. Edgar Hoover to catch the Weather Underground and the growing desire by the U.S. ruling class to amplify surveillance and “counter-intelligence” activities in Muslim communities. They were also part of a larger project to create conditions of “Total Information Awareness” on behalf of the secret police. The ruling class was planning out how to subvert the nominal restrictions placed on domestic spy agencies after the COINTELPRO, Watergate, and MKULTRA scandals while also utilizing new computer technologies to crack down on Black and migrant communities as well as anti-imperialist activists.
Fusion centers have a many-years long development. The first official fusion center is the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC). Established by CIA operatives under the cover of the newly-formed DEA, EPIC created a vast, computerized database for law enforcement agencies all over the country. Justified under the guise of the “war on drugs,” EPIC was also explicitly and consciously a tool for border enforcement. In actual fact, EPIC was the importation of a “counter-insurgency” model and techniques developed through centuries of colonial wars and occupations and formalized must fully by the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. That also included technologies tested for the first time in Vietnam, like an integrated radar-sensor-aerial border surveillance program known as IGLOO WHITE.
Notably, a major organizer of both the Phoenix Program and the Office of Public Safety police training program was the CIA officer Robert “Blowtorch” Komer. Komer was in charge of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), which was basically an assassination squad said to have killed at least 20,000 Vietnamese, while also organizing police chiefs from the United States to train police around the world in the methods of brutality refined in stateside Black and working class communities.
What is more substantial than any particular technologies was the construction of a nationwide policing system, first in an ad-hoc way through Joint Terrorism and other task forces like HIDTAs and then systematically with the formation of DHS. The Sept. 11 attacks were used to justify reconstructing the whole federal police system to be that modeled off of national occupations. The most direct model for this was, again, the Phoenix Program, but the Phoenix Program itself was developed out of a series of conversations organized by the Rand Corporation in 1962 that brought together British, French, Australian, U.S., and other officers with direct experience of colonial occupations and “counter-insurgency,” particularly in Malaysia and Algeria.
The basic structure of that model is to have a geographic hierarchy of intelligence sharing, starting from the local and moving up to the national, each with their own CIA or similar overseer. In the U.S., this looks like real-time crime centers and/or municipal fusion centers (district/local) and DHS-backed fusion centers (state/province) all combined in various networks, particularly DHS’s Intelligence and Analysis division.
These police entities have the official purpose of fighting crime and terrorism, but in actual fact almost exclusively surveil oppressed communities and political activists while creating fake propaganda whipping up moral panics that go to all of the police departments in a particular state. One example of the latter was a May 2024 bulletin sent by the Connecticut Intelligence Center that claimed May 14, the day before Nakba Day, was being promoted by “social media accounts” as a connected anti-Israel “Burning Day.” This was completely fabricated but served to give a plausible reason why local police should be on alert about potential “domestic violent extremists” on Nakba Day.
Confidential informants
Each individual agency presumably has its own “Human Intelligence” programs, which is a fancy way of saying confidential informants. The FBI has over 15,000 official confidential informants, with the expectation that for every “on the books” paid informant, there are two or three times that many “off the books.” ICE also has its own informants, despite having basically no oversight mechanisms or coherent policy for maintaining them according to a Congressional audit.
Local police have their own undercover and informant operations, although there is surely overlap between agencies. These are both the “heart” of modern policing and the most obviously corrupt part. There is no investigations without informants and undercover operatives, and informant and undercover investigations necessarily mean police participating in criminal activity. In New Brunswick, Mass., for example, a major Boston Globe investigation (“Spotlight: Snitch City”) showed that former police chief Paul Oliveira not only made his career through cultivating relationships with drug dealers, but also that the FBI helped cover it up.
Informants may be used to “gather intelligence.” However, they are also used to harass and entrap people of color and activists. The work of informants goes a long way to creating the myth of “terrorist threats,” in the name of “stopping terrorism.” A 2012 report by Project Salam estimates that at least 93% of “terrorism” cases are completely made up and many of those are “the FBI foiling its own entrapment plots, often after having targeted mentally ill defendants.” Many of the so-called “terrorism” stings are due to the extreme penetration of FBI and local police’s “counter-terrorism” units informant networks in Muslim and Black communities. The Muslim Justice League found through a grassroots survey that one out of ten Muslims in Boston either had or knew someone from the community who had the FBI knock their door.
The entire system of policing in the United States is set-up to create and sustain large informant networks. That is, for example, why the vast majority of “convictions” at all levels, in some places virtually 100%, are due to plea deals. The point is to make people so uncomfortable and uncertain that they will take a plea and potentially become an informer, even if they are innocent.
Coercing people into becoming informants was on open display in Minneapolis, where U.S. citizens detained without charges reported being taken into interrogation rooms and given the option to work for ICE in exchange for protection. This must be seen as broadly in line with policing practices everywhere. That includes in Minneapolis, where County and State Police ran a bizarre program during the Occupy movement, when they gave activists drugs, reportedly mostly marijuana, in a warehouse by the airport and attempted to turn them into informers.
Putting the pieces together, mobilize against the nationwide police apparatus!
The United States is a country whose history includes ongoing anti-Indigenous ethnic cleansing, growing border authoritarianism, and the largest prison population in the world. Many of the worst atrocities of the last 100 years were carried out by U.S. forces or armed groups trained and directed by them. The U.S. police are often on the frontlines of these atrocities.
“Reforms” to the policing system often are not only ineffective, but actually tend to increase police power. Automated License Plate Readers and bodycams are both examples of this phenomenon. Similarly, attempts to paper over the many mechanisms of local and federal police cooperation without addressing the basic facts of the U.S. police apparatus tend to build illusions in the local police, who are no ally of working and oppressed peoples.
Instead of following the path laid out by capitalist politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties, who support the cops every step of the way, the millions in the streets struggling against ICE and FBI terror need to recognize what the migrant community has always said “La policia, la migra, la misma porquería!” (“the police, the immigration enforcement, the same bullshit”).
That means responding politically to every act of police violence and every attempt to frame-up our community members and siblings in struggle. Building a movement capable of defeating the MAGA agenda and the domestic terrorism carried out by federal police entails being clear-eyed about the inseparability between all the violent arms of the capitalist state.
First published here by Workers’ Voice
Photo: The Columbus Dispatch
