Ask Wasty: The ZBI

 

Wasty: Given the fact that Zootopia is its own independent city-state, with its own government, it's a given it would have a ZBI. That said when compared to the equivalent in significantly larger nations, I imagine Zootopia's ZBI is rather small. Maybe less than one hundred employees total, working out of offices nestled within the different ZPD buildings across the city. Their job is largely the same I'd imagine, dealing with threats to Zootopian security with long-term stealth investigations, monitoring chatter on the web, that sort of thing. Basically slow burn investigations that don't require urgent scrutiny. That said, the minimal size of the ZBI has hurt their ability to keep tabs on all the goings on they would prefer to keep track of, which led to two massive blunders that really damaged their reputation in recent years. Those blunders were of course the Night Howler Scandal and the Zootopia's Last Night Case.

With the Night Howler case, the nature of it and lack of coherent chatter surrounding it led the ZBI to believe, like much of the general public, that it was some sort of virus or predator-specific tic. What little work was done on their end regarding the situation was digging into foreign channels to see if it was some sort of Biological warfare effort from a foreign government. As the Night Howler attacks ramped up, Predators on staff were pressured to leave the organization, and most of them did not return after the true nature of the case broke. Naturally once Dawn was exposed, of the many fingers of blame pointed by the public, a number of them fell on the ZBI for their failure to find out the true nature of the conspiracy despite the tools at their disposal. Needless to say, confidence in the organization was wounded.

However, when the Last Night Case occurred, and many powerful mammals and sycophants were exposed and planted in various organizations and political roles, the ZBI included, public trust in the organization completely bottomed out. This led to even more ZBI agents, (The ones who weren't found to be co-conspirators), retiring early or quitting altogether, and brought us to our current number of active agents being around fifty or less or so when it had close to one hundred pre-Night Howler Scandal. At present the ZBI is in a bit of disarray, much of its investigative tools have been turned over to the ZPD while the organization is restructured by the order of Mayor Snow. Whether it proves to be a competent organization after the restructuring is unknown, only time will tell.