Five years ago, thanks to a federal program that distributes surplus military equipment to local police, Bridgeport acquired a heavily armored vehicle capable of withstanding a mine blast. Other places like Bristol, Hartford, New London, and Willimantic also got one.
As local media published town-by-town lists of the night vision goggles, rifles, thermal scopes, underwater sound equipment, reconnaissance cameras, and other armored vehicles acquired under the program, Connecticut legislators voted to henceforth prohibit the acquisition of certain military items.
In a post-George Floyd world, when citizens nationwide openly question the use of police force and officers often find themselves an unwelcomed presence in neighborhoods, simple transparency, like those town-by-town lists, is paramount, says one UConn researcher.
It’s also the thing most in danger, as what he calls “police finance organizations” introduce secrecy and a rising amount of dark money into policing.
“Police departments are funded largely by taxpayers through municipal budgets, but we’ve found there’s a lot of other money going to police that you don’t know about or have control over as a voter or taxpayer,” says sociologist Simon Yamawaki Shachter, an assistant professor at UConn. “When you don’t know what’s going into a police budget, that raises questions about who the police are working for. Is it the community that pays taxes or someone else?”
Shachter and researchers from Harvard University and the University of Chicago introduce the new concept of police finance organizations in their paper, “The Social Structure of Private Donations to Police,” published recently in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
In it, they define such organizations as simply private entities that give resources to police. These private entities, however, aren’t subject to the same level of scrutiny as police departments, through freedom-of-information requests and public annual reports for example.
Among the larger category of police finance organizations, they say there are three smaller types: “connectors,” “boosters,” and “havens.”
In most cases, taxpayers and voters don’t know this is happening. — Simon Yamawaki Shachter
Police connectors are entities that generally are in major U.S. cities and provide resources to multiple police departments, oftentimes serving as hubs between parts of the private funding network.
Police boosters, on the other hand, give only to a single department and tend to be hyperlocal in their fundraising and giving. Police havens, though, are organizations that operate as a savings account for departments, that is, taking in private donations as deposits and making withdrawals to give to departments upon need or request.
“While police finance organizations sound fine at face value, what’s interesting is that people can make their own tax-deductible gifts to police departments without an intermediary,” Shachter explains. “So, it’s curious why these organizations need to exist in the first place if people can just go to their local police department and write them a check. Why does there need to be this extra organization in the middle?”
These organizations, he says, often are incorporated as nonprofits, and as 501(c)3s are not required to disclose donor lists, limiting the public’s knowledge of where the funding originated from. Not only don’t they have to report their donors, they’re also not subject to freedom-of-information laws, so even a written request doesn’t get the information.
Nearly 1,000 police finance organizations nationwide
Shachter says the New York City Police Foundation, founded in 1971, was the first major private organization to support police, and even as others popped up over the years, their popularity was slow to grow until about 2015 when their number exploded.
Police benevolent associations were not part of the study, Shachter notes, and weren’t considered police finance organizations because they’re a function of police unions and work to support officers, not general policing, namely equipment and training.
Using information from GuideStar Candid, Shachter and the other researchers found thousands of entries just from the keywords “police,” “sheriff,” “law enforcement,” and “trooper” in tax filer names, mission statements, program accomplishments, expense descriptions, and addresses.
They worked to winnow down the dataset and figure there are 961 police finance organizations nationwide, which, Shachter says, is a conservative estimate based on various limitations in the data and other roadblocks researchers hit.
They managed to discern, however, that between 2014 and 2019, police finance organizations had a revenue of $480 million, of which $396 million went to police havens, $56 million to police connectors, and $28 million to police boosters, according to the study.
The average donation to a police haven was $22,243 – a skewed number thanks to a handful of multimillion-dollar gifts, the study says, explaining that havens often gave money to individual officers, provided nonmaterial gifts to departments, facilitated discounted purchases by departments, and offered free loans of equipment.
Those giving the most have strong political agendas and are trying to exert policy influence in different ways. — Simon Yamawaki Shachter
Havens also exchanged $5 million among themselves through 80 individual donations, “creating a shadow network of internal financial exchanges,” the study says.
Shachter says police finance organizations find all sorts of ways to secretly pass support to departments, including by donating to individual officers. If gifts are less than $5,000 per officer, the donation needn’t be disclosed.
This means, for instance, the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation was able in 2020 to give that department 3,330 bulletproof vests and 1,720 vest covers by marking them for individual officers without having to report the $1.47 million donation, the study says.
Two years prior in 2018, a different organization, the Chicago Police Foundation, purchased “special classes for CPD,” but details on what those classes were for aren’t readily available, a fact that’s not surprising to Shachter. The study notes that its disclosure at all was likely a mistake.
“Most of the police departments and most of the organizations we studied are using this money for whatever they want, going around any public process,” Shachter says. “We have no idea what’s being offered in these trainings. We just know they’re held and that police go to them.”
Gifts from billionaire donors
From youth programming and defibrillators to shields and even a helicopter, donations run the gamut.
“Most of the gifts are very benign, supporting the health of canines and medical training for officers, things I think we all support and say should be part of public budgets,” Shachter says. “But if you look at the amount of money that moves through these organizations, it appears far more nefarious. Those giving the most have strong political agendas and are trying to exert policy influence in different ways.”
Study researchers found three private donors who gave significant support.
Howard Buffett, son of billionaire Warren Buffett, gave to police finance organizations in Illinois, which led to the ouster of the director of the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board over ethical concerns.
In Arizona, the younger Buffett made donations and became an active member of the Assist Team, giving him direct access to police and allowing him to develop a relationship with U.S. Border Patrol, according to the study.
Founder of the hedge fund Citadel Kenneth Griffin himself disclosed gifts to police finance organizations, offering a combined $35 million to the University of Chicago Crime Lab in 2018 and 2022, the study says, noting that Griffin openly tied the gifts to mayoral, gubernatorial, and national policy. Because the University of Chicago is a private institution, it did not have to disclose the gift.
And billionaires Laura and John Arnold, outspoken supporters of law enforcement, funded in 2016 a pilot surveillance drone program through a police haven supporting Baltimore police, the study says. When the community learned of the surveillance program, it was immediately shut down.
There’s no doubt, Shachter says, that big donors are using their gifts to influence local, state, and national policy conversations.
“Our goal with this study is to take the first step of shining a light on this area of dark money and then try to make it more transparent. We would love changes to the IRS tax code to require better reporting, like gifts to individual officers. They should report that just like other public officials,” he says.
“In most cases, taxpayers and voters don’t know this is happening,” he continues. “City councils don’t even know, and if they’re not aware of these off-the-book line items how can they appropriately budget? There are so many ways these organizations are purposely avoiding transparency and that gives us reason for alarm.”
