Will Private Money Take the Sting Out of Obama’s Police Demilitarization?

Police foundations solicit millions in private money that gets spent with little oversight.

A member of the St. Louis County Police Department trains his weapon on protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, last year. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

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Last week, President Obama issued an executive order banning federal transfers of certain categories of military equipment — including tracked armored vehicles, grenade launchers and large-caliber firearms — to local law enforcement agencies. The administration’s move to rein in police militarization has been widely applauded as a necessary step to rebuilding community trust in police.

However, the absence of federal support will not necessarily put an end to departmental excess. That’s because police departments are increasingly relying on non-official channels with little to no formal oversight to finance their crime-fighting strategies.

Over the past four decades hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations have been funneled into police department coffers through a network of public charities established to provide supplemental support to cash-strapped chiefs. Much of the money provided by these “police foundations” has been used to improve officer safety or to fund community outreach programs and innocuous equipment purchases. Just last week the Philadelphia Police Foundation began soliciting donations to replace 14 aging motorcycles in the PPD’s Highway Patrol’s fleet.

But published reports suggest that some departments have turned to charitable contributions to intentionally skirt public accountability by avoiding the oversight that comes with spending taxpayer dollars. There is also strong circumstantial evidence that large corporate benefactors are using their cozy relationships with local police leaders to circumvent competitive bidding for major municipal technology upgrades.

Whether these nonprofit groups will step in to fill the void left by the President’s order restricting federal equipment transfers remains to be seen. But in light of the resounding call for more police accountability, the notion of departments sidestepping formal procurement channels to acquire technology and resources off-the-grid is worthy of concern.

The use of private dollars to pay for policing resources began in New York City in 1971 and expanded considerably through the 1990s. In 2010 the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) teamed up with Target Corporation to launch the National Police Foundations Project to promote the practice; and today nearly every major U.S. city hosts a nonprofit police foundation dedicated to facilitating departmental funding outside the normal municipal budgeting process.

A cursory review of public tax data suggests the groups are taking in more and more money every year. By far the largest beneficiaries, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, rely on their foundations for roughly $3 million a year in supplemental funding. Both departments have come under scrutiny recently for how they acquire and spend that money.

Last year, two reporters looked into the relationship between the departments and their associated foundations for ProPublica and found a troubling lack of transparency.

According to their investigation, instead of following formal protocol to acquire Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) — a process that would take at least a year and include a number of public hearings — the LAPD reached out to its foundation and quietly spent roughly $500,000 on the technology. Since then ALPRs have become a source of controversy for the LAPD, and their use of the devices — and refusal to turn over related data — is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit. Public records also show that in 2012 the LAPD used more than $20,000 in foundation money to buy cellphone tracking devices known as “stingrays.” The legality of the devices, which are regularly used without a warrant, is the subject of an ongoing debate in the courts, and the federal government is now looking into how police departments deploy them.

The authors raised similar concerns about both departments’ close relationship with a CIA-backed software company called Palantir that supplies highly sophisticated surveillance equipment used by intelligence agencies.

New York City’s Police Foundation came under scrutiny again in April after The Intercept reported that the foundation received a $1 million donation in 2012 from the government of the United Arab Emirates, which the NYPD would describe only as “an unrestricted gift to the General Fund.”

A corresponding line item on the foundation’s tax return suggests the money may have been spent on the NYPD’s International Liaison Program — a rather shadowy overseas intelligence operation launched in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

If the idea of American police officers being sponsored by corporations and foreign governments isn’t worrisome enough, consider that finding out what programs benefactors paid for, or indeed who paid for them, is difficult if not impossible.

The mere fact that The Intercept was able to identify the source of the UAE grant is rather extraordinary given that police foundations, as charities, are not required to publicly reveal who their donors are. While some foundations make donor information public they are under no obligation to do so.

In the recent past, criminal justice experts — including a former director of the Vera Institute of Justice — argued that by harnessing external support from the business community, police foundations actually increase accountability by providing “useful distance from the partisan interests of a particular government administration.”

There may be some merit in that; but in the current environment, surely the more the public knows about what police departments are doing in their name the better. As the federal government turns to the power of the purse to force sometimes unwanted reforms on the nation’s police, journalists and other watchdog groups need to pay close attention to these outside sources of police funding to make sure they aren’t undermining those efforts.

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Christopher Moraff writes on politics, civil liberties and criminal justice policy for a number of media outlets. He is a reporting fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a frequent contributor to Next City and The Daily Beast.

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Tags: police

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