The Louisiana Fusion Center (LaSAFE) told the school‑safety task force that statewide threat reporting is fragmented, producing undercounts and limiting the center’s ability to provide timely, analytic insights to local partners.

Lieutenant Jonathan Kemp, director of the state Fusion Center, said the center was created after September 11 to collect, vet and share intelligence across federal, state and local partners. “We collect it. We analyze it and push it back out to our partners,” Kemp said. He noted that LaSAFE operates around the clock and maintains an analyst specifically assigned to school‑safety analytics.

Kemp and other fusion‑center staff said a persistent problem is the absence of a mandatory path for schools or local law enforcement to report serious threats to the Fusion Center rather than only to a local 9‑1‑1 center. The center’s published counts of “school threats” are therefore incomplete, Kemp said, and require a disclaimer when reported to the Legislature.

Kemp described operational examples of the analytic value LaSAFE can provide: aggregated social‑media trend analysis, correlation of regional patterns and mapping of recurring threat sources. He also recounted a recent spoofed incident where multiple schools received false phone threats from an overseas source, underscoring the need for centralized vetting and cross‑jurisdictional response coordination.

Kemp said LaSAFE operates under statutory protections (he cited the state intelligence‑protection provision discussed at the hearing) that allow certain intelligence to be shared among investigators without broad public disclosure. He urged task force members to consider policy or guidance that would encourage schools and local agencies to report credible threats to LaSAFE and protect sensitive investigative information where appropriate.

Task force members asked the Fusion Center to provide a more detailed briefing on what data the center needs (and in what format), what legal protections apply to intelligence records, and how centralized reporting could be operationalized in a way that addresses school leaders’ concerns about stigmatizing campuses. LaSAFE agreed to supply those materials to the task force.