Private donors such as big box stores, fossil fuel companies, and tech giants secretly donate hundreds of millions of dollars annually to law enforcement agencies and related foundations, allowing police to conduct special Weapons and technology can be purchased.
Experts say this massive influx of “dark money” money into police departments is detailed in a new University of Chicago research report and additional analysis shared exclusively with the University of Chicago. leverlaw enforcement becomes dependent on corporations and the powerful donors who fund them, rather than the communities that officers are sworn to serve.
“Our major discovery is that the world of private donations to police is much larger and more complex than previously estimated,” said Robert Vargas, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study. There was,” he said.
The study, which analyzed a database of nonprofit tax returns, found that from 2014 to 2019, more than 600 private donors and organizations collectively contributed $461 million to police and other nonprofits that support them. It turned out that he was pouring in dollars. “This is suspected to be an undercount,” he said, because it was based on the organization's own disclosures about donations.
Some of the private funding is coming from big retailers like Target and Walmart. oil companies such as Chevron and Shell; Microsoft and other Big Tech companies are companies that have touted their support for law enforcement for years.
A new study has revealed how easily private donors can secretly funnel money to police forces. Researchers have found that anonymous donors are using asset managers like Fidelity Investments to funnel money to police foundations and other opaque nonprofits that support police operations. found. The slush fund made Fidelity's philanthropic arm one of the nation's largest private donors to police departments.
In many jurisdictions, private funding for police departments is provided with virtually no oversight and cannot be used to purchase surveillance technology, high-tech weapons, or other items that police agencies may struggle to justify. Masu.
For example, the Baltimore City Police Department has for years used private funds to fund a covert aerial surveillance program that can track people's locations around the city in real time. Billionaire philanthropists in Texas funded the program, but the money was channeled through a Baltimore nonprofit, allowing it to stay out of the public eye for a while. When news of the program became public, protests erupted and a court ultimately ruled it unconstitutional.
In Los Angeles, the city's police department used funds from Target, also routed through the local police foundation, to purchase software from venture capitalist Peter Thiel's data analytics company Palantir. The software purports to provide police with vast amounts of sensitive data and identify “hot crimes.” Spots. ”
In Philadelphia, a privately funded police nonprofit has purchased bulletproof helmets, drones, motorcycles and even horses for the city's police force.
Such surveillance technology and military equipment are disproportionately deployed in Black communities and low-income neighborhoods. Research has shown that increased surveillance increases local policing, which can negatively impact community health and well-being.
Private funding makes up only a small portion of what states and cities spend on police departments, which some estimates put at more than $100 billion annually.
“It's a drop in the bucket compared to local government budgets,” said Gin Armstrong, executive director of Little Sis, an organization that examines corporate power and influence.
But Mr. Armstrong insisted that the influence of the money was immense.
“It's really important to see how this is done.” [private] Money is being spent,” she said. “Most of local government budgets go towards salaries and benefits. This concerns equipment and laboratory technology, all of which is outside the scope of public discussion and often even outside of public reporting. '' Armstrong went on to say it was a “huge slush fund with absolutely no accountability.''
“Now we know how big that slush fund is,” she said.
One of the most common ways that private donations from oil companies, billionaires, big retailers, etc. reach law enforcement agencies are through donations established to support law enforcement agencies in specific cities, such as New York. It is through the Police Foundation, which is a non-profit organization. City Police Foundation and Los Angeles Police Foundation.
According to public New York City data, the NYPD reported $30 million in private donations from 2019 to 2022, of which $26.8 million (almost 90 percent) came from the NYPD Foundation. It is.
The Police Foundation positions itself as a charity, soliciting donations and distributing those funds to local police departments. Their supporters argue that the initiative improves police morale and that the additional funding could supplement strained public budgets, although local police departments tend to have plenty of public funding. ing.
“I mention [police foundations] It's kind of a shell company,” said Kevin Walby, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg who studies police infrastructure in the United States and Canada. “They can move money in ways that public institutions can't. They don't really have robust reporting or disclosure mechanisms.” The term “dark money” refers to their support. He said it was an appropriate expression.
Police foundations, like most charities, are not required to publicly report their donors.until the exposure from of interceptFor example, the New York City Police Foundation did not disclose that it received a $1 million donation from the United Arab Emirates in 2012, but that the donation went to police to help with “criminal investigations” in the city. It was not disclosed even when it was handed over directly.
There are about 250 police foundations in the United States, and nearly 80 percent of them say they fund technology and equipment for police, as well as programs and public affairs for officers. Such organizations have been around for decades, but were introduced in the 1990s, particularly in response to calls to limit increasing public funding for police, which had nearly tripled in the past few decades. It has grown steadily since then, Walby said. Research has proven that the Police Foundation's income is increasing year on year.
“The big period of growth happened after 2020,” Walby said, adding that this was a “direct response” to protests over the killing of George Floyd in May of that year. “They were using corporate funding as a kind of backstop against running out of money.” [the police] movement. “
Police foundation corporate bankrollers often appear to receive high returns on their investments. For example, Target has long funded surveillance and crime prevention programs in cities across the country, helping to crack down on retail theft and petty crime in disinvested areas, perhaps more than other more pressing community concerns. have succeeded in doing so.
In St. Louis, the city's police chief receives $100,000 a year directly from the local police foundation in addition to his salary, an arrangement that critics say ensures the department benefits local businesses. are doing.
Previous research has shown that police foundations receive tens of millions of dollars annually from private donors. But a new study by Vargas and his co-authors shows that these local foundations are actually part of a much wider range of nonprofits and foundations designed to funnel private funds and in-kind donations to police departments. It was shown that it was part of a network involving hundreds of millions of dollars.
A new study identifies hundreds of underground financial organizations that fund police departments, sometimes donating directly to law enforcement agencies and sometimes to other police nonprofits. , forming a complex web of donors and intermediaries.
In total, these organizations donated more than $826 million over six years and reported more than $16 billion in revenue, according to additional analysis shared by the researchers. of lever.
These organizations include associations of sheriffs and police chiefs, national nonprofits like the 100 Club, and billionaire Warren Buffett's son Howard, a wealthy police advocate. This includes private foundations such as Buffett's organization. Additionally, researchers found that some police foundations, such as New York City, St. Louis, and San Diego, donate not only to police agencies in their own cities, but also to other law enforcement agencies across the country.
“This is an important set of findings because it reveals the amount of capital that is actually flowing and reveals the number of corporate nodes in the network,” Walby said.
Financial services firms such as Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab also appear in the data as some of the biggest donors to crack down on underground finance groups. Both companies allow wealthy individuals to funnel money to nonprofits through “donor-advised funds.” Charitable investment accounts are becoming increasingly popular as a way to anonymize donations and receive tax breaks at the same time. Various police foundations have begun promoting this funding arrangement as one of their ways to donate.
“The truth is, if someone donates a large sum of money and wants to cover their tracks, they can simply donate it to a police nonprofit from a donor-advised fund and essentially leave no paper trail behind.” Vargas said.
Critics have described donor-advised funds as a form of billionaire philanthropy with no accountability and are calling for more transparency and regulation, but federal regulators are expected to launch a major crackdown. He seems to be hesitating. Last November, the Internal Revenue Service proposed some modest restrictions on the use of the rule to curb spending on lobbying and other non-charitable purposes, but police charities also agreed to the new It is one of the groups opposing the rules.
The researchers found that police foundations and other private donors also find ways to limit the disclosure of donations they give to police departments. Researchers looked at Chicago as a case study and found that 90% of individual donations to police were unreported, revealing “police financial institutions' interest in keeping police funding secret'' , the researchers wrote.
In most cases, the millions in black money funding that police agencies receive each year is completely legal and poses a challenge for those who want greater transparency.
“There are almost no laws or policies regulating foundation donations to police,” said Evan Feeney, deputy senior campaign director at Color of Change, an advocacy group that has opposed corporate support for police.
In this way, the foundation creates a kind of loophole that “legally allows officials and departments to accept gifts from vendors, avoiding conflict of interest and donor disclosure rules,” Feeney said. For example, Palantir donated to the Police Foundation and subsequently funded the police department's purchase of his Palantir proprietary data analytics technology.
Even in places like Los Angeles, where gifts from foundations require formal city approval, such processes often appear to be perfunctory and are often tampered with by local officials over the objections of local communities and activists. The gift is rubber stamped.
“Cities must end these untraceable donations and require that any equipment, equipment, technology, or software purchased or donated through police foundations be subject to disclosure, oversight, and accountability laws,” Feeney said. he said.
There has been some movement on this issue. In January, New York City, with the reluctant support of local police departments, required police departments to submit annual reports on how they spent millions of dollars in private donations received from foundations and other sources. A law was enacted to make it compulsory. . Unlike the use of public funds, the department has not previously been required to disclose how it uses private funds.
The law also requires the New York City Police Department to provide information about individual donors. However, many of these donations will go through the New York City Police Foundation, so donors will likely remain anonymous.
