Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

How does private money flow to police departments, and what do these donations reveal about power and accountability in public safety? Although previous studies have focused on police foundations moving tens of millions of dollars, the authors’ research uncovers a broader, more complex ecosystem of private police financial support. Using a unique data license from GuideStar Candid—all nonprofit organization tax returns from 2014 to 2019—the authors describe a larger and integrated world of organizations moving private money to police. The authors introduce the concept of police finance organizations: private entities that supply material resources to police departments without facing the same levels of public accountability, regulations, and transparency requirements as the police departments themselves. This exploratory data analysis and social network methods revealed three types of these organizations: (1) connectors, which distribute resources across multiple police departments; (2) boosters, which donate exclusively to one police department; and (3) havens, which publicly and materially support police without officially reporting these gifts. Overall, the authors provide the most complete description of the vast and underestimated structure of private donations, redefining the understanding of private-public intersections in policing and raising new questions about accountability in public safety practice.

Keywords

police finance organizations policing funding privatization nonprofits

In the past few decades, local governments have increasingly turned to private donations to sustain their funding (Brecher and Wise 2008; Gazley, Cheng, and Lafontant 2018; Nelson and Gazley 2014; Schatteman and Bingle 2015; Smith 2010). These donations have the potential to give private actors outsized influence over public policy while also incentivizing quid pro quo arrangements between donors and public agencies (Cordelli 2022). This influence and exchange relationship can become particularly worrying when it comes to the funding of police departments (Fridman and Luscombe 2017; Walby, Lippert, and Luscombe 2020). Through a focus on police foundations (defined as nonprofits with missions to financially support the police), scholars have recently found $10 million to $25 million flowing annually between police foundations and police departments, an amount that has been increasing steadily since 2001 (Fernandez and Tremblay-Boire 2021; Fridman and Luscombe 2017; Walby, Lippert, and Luscombe 2018). However, past studies of private donations to police have relied on small sample sizes due, in large part, to the difficulty of tracking the activities of organizations who seek to reduce the transparency of their activities. At the same time, other social scientists have highlighted increasing privatization in police departments where corporations, landlords, social workers, bosses, neighbors, and other nonstate actors legally surveil and punish outside of the public, formal criminal justice system (Brayne 2021; Desmond and Valdez 2012; Garland 2001; Loader and Walker 2001; Mazerolle and Ransley 2005). This study bridges these two literatures by uncovering a broader and more complex ecosystem of private financial support for law enforcement. Although police foundations have been a focal point of prior research, representing an explicit channel through which private funds flow to police departments, this project identifies and maps an additional vast, previously invisible network of police finance organizations that operate outside the boundaries of existing scholarly work. We use a restricted-use data license from GuideStar Candid, which enables us to analyze tax filings for 754,262 nonprofit organizations and render a more complete description of private donations to police, finding 961 police finance organizations spending $461 million from 2014 to 2019. With these data, we applied descriptive social network analysis to understand basic donation patterns among these organizations. We identify an expansive ecosystem of entities we term police finance organizations: private entities that supply material resources to police departments without facing the same levels of public accountability, regulations, and transparency requirements as police departments themselves. This definition foregrounds a common finding across studies of the private funding of government and the privatization of police: privatization commonly leads to a decrease in accountability, regulation, and transparency.

Our quantitative and qualitative descriptive analyses identified three types of police finance organizations. First, police connectors were organizations that received private donations and made donations to multiple police departments. These organizations tended to be located in major U.S. cities, donated to police departments all over the country, and acted as hubs connecting disparate parts of the private funding network. Second, police boosters were organizations that received private donations and donated exclusively to one police department. Often founded by the recipient police department, police boosters were highly localized police nonprofit organizations connecting multiple donors interested in its specific locality. Third, police havens were organizations that received private money, but made zero reported donations. Police havens, therefore, either operated as savings accounts for police (accruing money to disburse when and where police needed it) or provided direct support for police by using tax loopholes or running its own policing programs. Our analysis also uncovered a private funding network concentrated around a small number of elite organizations driving substantial flows of money to police. Finally, our study includes qualitative analyses to illuminate how these organizations passed resources to police, what they provided to police, and why our quantitative data still likely underestimate the scale of private donations.

Our study makes several contributions. First, we provide the most in-depth quantitative description of private donations to police to date. As more scholars have become interested in the causal effects of police privatization and privatization more generally, our descriptive work provides the field with ways to better describe, measure, and conceptualize causal research questions in this field. Without these descriptive findings and these data, the study of private donations to police will remain limited to studying the theoretical and ethical implications of government gift giving when an excludable good is at stake (Ayling, Shearing, and Grabosky 2009; Fridman and Luscombe 2017; Walters 2004). Second, we provide a theoretical innovation by introducing police finance organizations as critical intermediaries that blur the lines between public and private governance. These entities not only shield police funding from public scrutiny but also enable private donors to exert influence over policing decisions, especially in smaller jurisdictions reliant on single-donor support. The escalating size and number of police finance organizations make them an increasingly compelling site to understand the patterns and effects of privatization in local governments and policing at large. Overall, our definition of police finance organizations opens up new ways for researchers to conceptualize and examine the donor influence and democratic oversight over police.

Private Funding of Local Government

Private funding of local government has long been characterized as a double-edged sword, offering both potential benefits and significant drawbacks. Scholars of public administration and urban governance have found that privatization often allows wealthy and powerful individuals to gain disproportionate influence over public policy (Cordelli 2022; McQuarrie 2012; Smith 2010). For decades, governance scholars have highlighted that privatization often comes from a mismatch between authority and resources. Under this conceptualization, limits of local government financing are the impetus for privatized funding of public functions. Stone’s (1993) concept of urban regimes highlighted how the resources of the corporate elite and Black middle class in Atlanta became essential for local governance, effectively shifting decision-making power away from democratic processes and into the hands of private actors. Instead of a democratic government, wealthy corporations wielded much of the decision making power in the city.

Since Stone, scholars have characterized the limited resources of local government as a starting point to understand how power is distributed among both public and private actors, from parties (Sellers 2002) to corporations (Logan and Molotch 2007) to nonprofit organizations (Marwell 2004). These authors problematize the “hollowing of the state” (Milward and Provan 2000) as public decision making power is devolved to organizations that may not be able to act in the best interests of city residents. Privatized funding, especially in areas such as policing, risks entrenching inequities because of self-interested or profit motives, or simply because these organizations are not representative or accountable to the population they seek to serve (Levine 2016; Mosley and Grogan 2012; Walby et al. 2020).

More recently, public administration scholars have described how this devolution of state authority to private actors is achieved, through strategies including collaborative governance, coproduction, cogovernance, or collective impact (Brandsen and Pestoff 2006; Cheng 2018; Osborne and Strokosch 2013). Although these initiatives have been common among public hospitals and universities for decades, they have more recently expanded, especially among K–12 schools, libraries, and parks (Smith 2010). There has been particularly rapid growth of these cogovernance initiatives across the United States in the past 10 to 20 years (Gazley et al. 2018; Nelson and Gazley 2014; Schatteman and Bingle 2015). These models suggest that private funding can, with thorough legal, regulatory, and participatory conditions, provide necessary resources for the provision of public goods without necessarily undermining accountability or equity (Brecher and Wise 2008; Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2006; Cheng 2019). These literatures suggest that privatization can perpetuate inequalities, but this is not necessarily the goal of the private actors, nor is it the definitive outcome of many of these initiatives (Brecher and Wise 2008; Fernandez and Tremblay-Boire 2021; Smith 2010; Toepler 2018).

In addition to illustrating how police finance organizations exemplify the previously theorized tensions between resource provision and democratic accountability, the findings of this study provide a new perspective on privatization of local government by showing that not all forms of privatization are created equal. By identifying and categorizing the distinct roles connectors, boosters, and havens play in police practice, this research highlights how the effects of privatization in policing and in other forms of local governance can serve diverse ends beyond just increasing budgets. These range from bypassing public budgeting processes, to accessing specialized tools and technology, to generating goodwill and reinforcing police legitimacy within the community, to establishing autonomy from local government, and more. Consequently, each type of police finance organization poses a unique set of accountability challenges while providing varying benefits to recipient departments. These organizations reshape the governance landscape in distinct ways, with some requiring greater scrutiny and concern than others, a conceptual framework broadly applicable to other areas of local governance.

Private Funding of Police

Private funding of police departments has become an increasingly prominent aspect of modern policing, yet its workings and implications are much less understood than the privatization of policing functions. As Sklansky (2006) emphasized, understanding private policing requires a foundational knowledge of its structures and operations. Privatization within police work has generally been criticized for eroding democratic oversight by preventing public scrutiny while expanding police control (Garland 2001; Loader and Walker 2001). Although scholars such as Joh (2005) have created a typology for the variety of ways private police work can function—(1) protective policing, (2) intelligence policing, (3) publicly contracted policing, and (4) corporate policing—privatization has predictable outcomes. Combining other literature on privatized policing with Joh’s typology, we identified three common outcomes. First, privatization brings a decline in public accountability. Garland (2001) argued that historically, privatization has been used to shield police departments from public control, particularly as a response to greater public and political scrutiny of police departments and growing demands for transparency. Second, privatization leads to an expansion of the police state. In the 1960s, police responded to a crisis in authority by using privatization as a central tool to expand policing, and have doubled down on this behavior since (Loader and Walker 2001; Mazerolle and Ransley 2005). Third, communities with fewer resources are more likely to be subjected to private policing (Desmond and Valdez 2012; Jain 2015).

Although much of the literature has focused on private policing practices, scholars have only recently started examining private funding as a distinct form of police privatization. Walby et al. (2018) identified the New York City Police Foundation as the first major private organization dedicated to funding the police when it was founded in 1971. Despite active efforts by the New York City Police Foundation and the International Association of Chiefs of Police to create more police foundations across the country, police departments were initially slow to take up this new, potentially controversial form of organization (Walby et al. 2018). The past decade, on the other hand, has seen a doubling in the number of police foundations and the money that flows through them (Fernandez and Tremblay-Boire 2021). These foundations provide an extra layer to the private funding of policing. Foundations, corporations, and individuals can fund public police departments directly and usually receive tax breaks similar to the charitable tax deduction in the process. However, funding a private police finance organization, instead of public law enforcement, adds an additional layer of privatization. Most immediately, this extra layer of privatization decreases transparency. Because nonprofits face fewer disclosure requirements than public entities, this layering limits public knowledge of where funds originate and how they are used.

The size of police foundations could be described as trivial, as the amount of funding they raise (in the hundreds of millions) pales in comparison with the billions of dollars that local governments spend on policing. This critique underestimates the implications of private donations to police for accountability and democracy. For instance, private funds often bypass public budgeting processes, enabling police departments to procure controversial technologies or launch initiatives without public oversight. Most city police budgets fund salary and benefits for police personnel, while private donations enable police departments to fund technologies and activities not subject to local government budgetary procedures (Walby et al. 2018). Thus, privatized funding often invites policing controversies (Fridman and Luscombe 2017), such as the constitutional gray area of surveillance technologies (Lemos and Charles 2018), or in the recent controversy over Atlanta’s building of a “Cop City,” a hundred million dollar training facility (Pratt 2024). These are funding areas that city councils may seek to avoid accountability for, but local police may still prioritize. These funds also create opportunities for favoritism or quid pro quo arrangements, further undermining democratic fairness and accountability (Fridman and Luscombe 2017; Walby et al. 2020). Fridman and Luscombe (2017) described these donations as a form of disreputable exchange. The gifts are legal but conflict with ideals of fairness and equality while inviting opportunities for controversy, bribes, and quid pro quo relationships. To empirically identify whether private donations to police commonly result in favoritism or quid pro quo arrangements, it is first necessary, as Sklansky (2006) argued, to describe what the world of private donations look like. Before researchers can identify and examine important causal questions, it is vital to more fully describe the world of private donations and its scale.

Analyzing a more complete dataset on private donations to police enabled us to describe a wider array of networks, pathways, legalistic, and rhetorical maneuvers that drive a much larger and increasingly unaccountable police state than previously known. Our access to more recent and digitally accessible financial data, for both qualitative and quantitative analyses, allowed us to build upon prior work on the financial world of privatized policing. By analyzing the private flows of money through multiple kinds of organizations to police, we render a far more complete picture of private donations to police. For example, Fernandez and Tremblay-Boire (2021) presented the most recent comprehensive study of police foundations and found 243 organizations collectively spending about $50 million over three years, 2015 to 2017. On the basis of our analysis, we find 961 organizations spending $461 million over six years (2014–2019). Additionally, because of data availability constraints, much of the prior literature focuses solely on organizations that call themselves “police foundations” or explicitly discuss funding police departments in their mission statements. These police foundations do not include organizations whose legally declared mission is for alternative purposes, such as police memorials, supporting officer families, youth programs, and others. Our data, gained from mass searches of e-filed tax forms, and followed up with intensive qualitative analysis led us to discover the importance of the broader network of police finance organizations.¹

The most typical form of police finance organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We note that the legal code grants these organizations the ability to (1) keep their donor lists private, (2) be exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, (3) ignore local attempts at regulations, and (4) entirely self-select their board and staff members (Lippert and Walby 2017; Simon, Dale, and Chisolm 2006; Walby et al. 2018; Walby et al. 2020). Although public police departments face significant disclosure and transparency requirements, the tax code provides police finance organizations the opportunity for police departments to evade disclosure, oversight, and public awareness. For example, a 2017 article depicted Paul Babeu, sheriff of Pinal County and the head of a police finance organization as “funneling money to a private group which buys things for him and his department. [As a result,] Babeu is able to avoid procurement laws and other transparency regulations which usually apply to government purchasing” (Anglen 2017).

Although nonprofit tax law requires police finance organizations to file public annual financial reports to state and federal governments and subjects them to state and federal regulations, these provide only limited information and oversight (Tompkins-Stange, Brandtner, and Bromley 2016). In extreme cases, police finance organizations may face public accountability pressures such as protests and government inquiries, but this need not end their activities. In a notable case, Baltimore’s police foundation was shut down after public outcries over its secretive and unaccountable behavior. Although the organization was shut down, its operations were simply moved to a different organizational entity, one that was far more organizationally, legally, and financially savvy (Lemos and Charles 2018).

In this study we take the first step in exploring these concerns by offering a framework and vocabulary to better understand the world of police finance organizations. By developing a typology of these entities, conducting network analyses, and qualitative analyses of how police finance organizations escape disclosure and support police, we lay the groundwork for future research into the broader implications of privatization in policing and its impact on governance.

Data and Methods

Finding and Operationalizing Police Finance Organizations and Their Funders

Our primary data source is tax returns from GuideStar Candid (www.guidestar.org), which includes the tax filings of 754,262 tax-exempt organizations. These data were provided in a tabular, full-text format by the Rustandy Center for Social Innovation at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Our sample covers filings between 2014 and 2019. The GuideStar Candid dataset is compiled and made available in multiyear batches. At the time of publication, the dataset contained a significant drop in coverage in the last tax year available, 2019, because of late filers. Many Form 990-EZ records from 2017 were also not available. Our findings, therefore, should be interpreted as an underestimate of the world of private donations to police.

We searched for the case-insensitive keywords police, sheriff, law enforcement, and trooper appearing in tax filer names, mission statements, program accomplishments, functional expense descriptions, and care-of addresses.² This yielded a list of organizations that were likely to be police finance organizations or police departments. Next, we searched the same keywords on tax-reported interorganizational donations,³ yielding pairs of organizations associated with a donation, where donor name, recipient name, or donation purpose was a keyword match.⁴ Finally, we searched the donations a second time regardless of keywords, collecting all donations among the organizations identified above. These searches yielded roughly 9,500 donors, 16,400 recipients, and 26,000 donations. After cleaning the data for misspellings and deduplicating multiple entries for the same organization, our keyword search of organization names produced 6,367 donors, 4,742 recipients, and 21,770 donations; our search of mission statements produced an additional 1,258 donors, 1,817 recipients, and 3,618 nondonors/nonrecipients to the latter; and our search of donations yielded an additional 5,583 donations.

Using donations as a primary data source, we identified a wider world of police finance organizations beyond the ones strictly named “police foundations,” by searching for donations made to police departments and police-supporting nonprofits. For example, our search located the National Tactical Officers Association in a $46,026 donation made in 2018 marked as “free equipment to police several municpal [sic] PD [police departments] in USA.” By searching in multiple textual contexts, our method even captured organizations with symbolic names such as Behind the Badge Foundation via its mission to “Honor the sacrifices of law enforcement officers.” Thus, we were able to increase the reach of these four keywords without directly searching less selective terms such as badge.

Accurately matching unique donation recipients across different tax filings was a major challenge because of missing data and naming variations. To illustrate the problem of missing data,⁵ 81 percent of donations are missing the recipient employer identification number, 21 percent are missing the recipient state, 21 percent are missing the recipient city, and 3 percent do not even list a recipient name. In some cases these naming variations were hard to parse: consider that donations to the 501(c)(3) Bay Area Deputy Sheriffs’ Charitable Foundation had also been written as “Bay Area Deputy Sheriffs Foundation,” “San Francisco Sheriffs Association Foundation,” and “San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs Association Foundation” but are distinct from the 501(c)(5) Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of the City of San Francisco also known as the “San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association.”

To clean these tax records, we replaced common typos, expanded common contractions and acronyms, and extracted place names embedded in organization names. To consolidate these records into a consistent set of organizations, we identified candidate duplicates by grouping by combinations of employer identification number, city, and state, and consolidated the pairs with high Levenshtein ratios. This reduced the dataset to 17,228 organizations and 27,353 donations. To provide a conservative estimate of this world of private donations to police, we included only donations made explicitly to police or police-related nonprofits. This reduced our dataset to 7,409 organizations and 13,219 donations. Again, this is a conservative estimate, as we erred on the side of caution by omitting organizations and donations from our sample for which we could not confirm their connections to police departments. In all, the Candid data we analyze include all nonprofit organizations we identified as police finance organizations, and all nonprofit organizations that donate to police finance organizations and/or police departments.

We inductively categorized police finance organizations on the basis of tax information and web searches on Candid and ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. A team of research assistants coded organizations and developed categories for types of potential police finance organizations such as police associations, police foundations, police memorials, and police service organizations. The team then met to unify these categories, delegate a second round of coding against the following refined definitions, and ensure intercoder reliability. See Table 1 for our category definitions.

Table 1.

Organization Category Descriptions.

	Category	Definition	Example
Private funders	Private foundation	Nonprofits answerable to an individual or family, living or deceased	Joan and Ron Collins Family Foundation
	Corporate foundation	Charitable arm of a corporation	Shaw’s Supermarket Charitable Foundation
	Community foundation	Service or grant-making foundation focusing on a local geographic region	Community Foundation of Boone County
	Issue-based foundation	Nonprofits engaged primarily as grant makers with specific thematic focus	Living Well Foundation
	Social service foundation	Nonprofits with primarily service-based missions	Special Olympics of Montana
	Police foundation	Nonprofits with publicly stated missions to support the police	Texas Highway Patrol Museum
Police finance organizations	Connector	Police-related nonprofits receiving private donations and donating to multiple police departments	San Diego Police Foundation
	Booster	Police-related nonprofits donating to a single police department that did not receive other police foundation support	Arkansas State Police Foundation
	Haven	Police-related nonprofits receiving private donations and making unofficially reported material support to police	Oceanside Police Officers Association
Government	Police department	Municipal, county, or state law enforcement	Dallas County Sheriffs Department
Government	Government	Other non–law enforcement departments and agencies	Marquette County

We operationalized police finance organizations as tax-exempt organizations whose primary activities included making donations of material resources of money, tools, or training to police departments. Furthermore, we differentiated police finance organizations from other police-related organizations and private funders of police on the basis of whether they both (1) received outside revenue for police causes and (2) made donations to police departments. This operationalization ensured that all police finance organizations were conduits of funds between donors and police that masked the identity of the organization’s donors, providing less accountability and transparency than what is expected of police departments.

We interpreted negative donations as money returned and cleaned these records by matching and subtracting them from a previous donation if possible, otherwise dropping the record, affecting five donations. We did not include noncash donations reported on Form 990 Schedules I and F for our analysis. The noncash donation valuations from Schedule A amounted to only 2 percent of total cash donations.

Exploratory and Network Data Analysis

To answer our research question of how private donations flowed to police, we conducted exploratory data analysis (Tukey 1977), combining summary statistics, data visualizations, and network analysis to uncover patterns in the data. Our initial results provided a comprehensive overview of how donations move through the network of police funding, revealing four primary types of transactions: (1) private donations to police finance organizations, (2) private donations to police departments, (3) donations among police finance organizations, and (4) donations from police finance organizations to police departments. We described the network of donations through several descriptive social network characteristics and visualizations, specifically component size, clustering, centrality, assortativity, distance, and degrees.

We next visualized the flow of funding in the dataset through Sankey diagrams and network diagrams with police finance organizations and police departments as nodes and the existence of a donation as a binary directed edge. These visualizations, alongside descriptive statistics, revealed the dominance of a single large connected component within the donation network. This component captured the majority of organizations and donation flows, exhibiting a distinct core-periphery structure. We used the Python package powerlaw (Alstott, Bullmore, and Plenz 2014) to measure the degree distribution. Key network measures—such as degree, clustering, k-core centrality, and closeness centrality—highlighted the influence of core nodes, while simulations of node removals demonstrated the network’s resilience. Following Borgatti’s (2006) key player problem, we ran a sensitivity analysis of the network fragmentation caused by multiple node removals. These simulations underscore the value of the Sankey diagram as a simplification of the role of police finance organizations in the flow of money and the powerful connecting role that elite organizations play in constructing a national network of private financing of police. This combination of descriptive and network analysis revealed not only the central actors and patterns of influence, but also the underlying structural dynamics that sustain and expand this complex system of private support.

Coding How Police Finance Organizations Spent Funding

We qualitatively augmented our quantitative data in three ways to better describe police finance organization activity. First, for the 496 police finance organizations categorized as “police havens”—entities that did not officially report donations to police on their tax forms—a team of research assistants compiled data from Web sites, social media, and tax forms to learn what these organizations spent their money on. Specifically, we searched for whether these organizations had X (Twitter) accounts, Facebook accounts, or a Web site. For 74 percent of the organizations most of the information came from the organization’s Web site, 11 percent from Facebook accounts, 7 percent from charity watchdog groups, and 5 percent from local news sources. Although this provided varying levels of detail, we were conservative in our classification: if we could not find any clear indication that an organization made gifts to police, we did not label it a police haven. We coded the data using Atlas.ti, marking every time an organization claimed to make a donation between 2014 and 2019. The coding team then met to identify themes and conducted second and third rounds of coding to identify the primary purchases police finance organizations were making and how the organizations rationalized the donations in funding reports. Although we were able to create a picture of the various uses of haven funding, we were unable to systematically value the total amount of funding havens donated to police because of a lack of official reporting.

Second, to understand how donations to police can go unreported, we conducted a case study of gifts from Chicago police finance organizations to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Chicago served as an ideal site for investigation, as it was large enough to encapsulate many strategies, while being small enough to allow us to be comprehensive in our search. Using annual reports, Web sites, social media feeds, news reports, and the Wayback Machine, we noted every donation each Chicago-based police finance organization claimed to make and the form of the donation. We compared these claims directly to the donations the organizations reported on their 990 forms. When the donations did not match, we consulted the legal code, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) instructions, and sector finance experts to identify why the donation may have not been reported. This case study revealed patterns of opaque financial practices that challenge public accountability.

Third, we sought to understand what police finance organizations were purchasing for law enforcement agencies. Our initial results show that the world of police finance organizations was highly skewed with only a few donors providing the bulk of funds. To explore the impact of major donors, we focused on the top three contributors responsible for the majority of funding in the dataset. Investigative research—using news articles, press releases, Web sites, FOIA requests, and tax records—enabled us to trace how these donors directed their contributions.

Results

Private Donations to Police

The two Sankey diagrams in Figure 1 visualize the count and dollar amount of donations from private donors to police through police finance organizations. The figure highlights the intermediary role of police finance organizations in receiving funding from private donors and either holding it for or donating to police departments. The organizations on the left side of the Sankey diagrams are private donors.⁶ These donors supported police by (1) funding departments directly or (2) funding a police finance organization. As Figure 1 shows, many of these donors also make donations directly to police departments, however, they simultaneously give through police finance organizations where their gifts face fewer required disclosures.

Figure 1.

Sankey diagram of total dollars (a) and total donations (b) to police connectors, boosters, havens, and police departments.

Table 2 lists descriptive statistics of all donations flowing into and out of all three types of police finance organizations. From 2014 to 2019, private donors reported $96 million in donations directly to police departments through 4,958 donations. At the same time, private donors reported $95 million in gifts to police havens, $11 million to police connectors, and $24 million to police boosters. This means that private donors to police are, in fact, relying more heavily on police finance organizations such as boosters, connectors, and havens to support police ($130 million) than direct donations to police ($96 million). Together, the total of $225 million that reach police in the form of cash (directly or indirectly through police finance organizations) is several times larger than previous estimates that focus exclusively on police foundations.

Table 2.

Donation Descriptive Statistics.

Group	Direction	Dyad	Count	Mean	Median	SD	Minimum	Maximum	Sum
Booster	Donations from	Connector	16	$27,075	$18,756	$32,235	$1,160	$126,938	$433,204
		Haven	1	$8,000	$8,000	—	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000
		Private	1,034	$23,286	$5,000	$86,392	$0	$1,000,000	$24,078,161
		Total	1,051	$23,330	$5,000	$85,779	$0	$1,000,000	$24,519,365
	Donations to	Booster	2	$16,500	$16,500	$7,778	$11,000	$22,000	$33,000
		Haven	14	$33,795	$11,558	$50,838	$0	$150,000	$473,129
		Police	233	$229,283	$15,800	$864,620	$0	$7,925,466	$53,422,943
		Total	249	$216,583	$15,000	$837,756	$0	$7,925,466	$53,929,072
	Total	Total	1,300	$60,345	$5,750	$381,742	$0	$7,925,466	$78,448,437
Connector	Donations from	Haven	3	$6,902	$3,237	$6,429	$3,143	$14,325	$20,705
		Private	570	$20,315	$2,500	$144,359	$0	$3,013,000	$11,579,397
		Total	573	$20,245	$2,500	$143,984	$0	$3,013,000	$11,600,102
	Donations to	Booster	16	$27,075	$18,756	$32,235	$1,160	$126,938	$433,204
		Connector	3	$2,603	$1,000	$3,401	$300	$6,510	$7,810
		Haven	89	$17,792	$14,416	$14,115	$0	$65,760	$1,583,447
		Police	780	$57,572	$8,936	$158,236	$0	$3,020,724	$44,906,479
		Total	888	$52,850	$10,000	$148,966	$0	$3,020,724	$46,930,940
	Total	Total	1,461	$40,062	$5,948	$147,842	$0	$3,020,724	$58,531,042
Haven	Donations from	Booster	14	$33,795	$11,558	$50,838	$0	$150,000	$473,129
		Connector	89	$17,792	$14,416	$14,115	$0	$65,760	$1,583,447
		Private	4,256	$22,243	$1,500	$148,282	$0	$4,442,832	$94,666,413
		Total	4,359	$22,189	$1,500	$146,562	$0	$4,442,832	$96,722,989
	Donations to	Booster	1	$8,000	$8,000	—	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000
		Connector	3	$6,902	$3,237	$6,429	$3,143	$14,325	$20,705
		Haven	80	$62,475	$16,250	$126,894	$0	$740,300	$4,997,976
		Total	84	$59,841	$14,530	$124,368	$0	$740,300	$5,026,681
	Total	Total	4,443	$22,901	$1,500	$146,252	$0	$4,442,832	$101,749,670
Total	Total	Total	7,204	$33,138	$3,000	$210,023	$0	$7,925,466	$238,729,149

Police havens—entities that do not report gifts to police on their tax forms—are the primary intermediary for private donors interested in supporting police, with the greatest numbers of organizations, donors, and amount of expenses. Although police havens’ reported receiving $95 million in private donations, police havens’ budget statements reported $43 million in net income (profit) and $396 million in revenue over the same six year time period (see Table 3). This suggests that havens are receiving large sums of undisclosed donations or other sources of revenue, and are either holding onto the funding (average net income was 1.5 times that of boosters and more than twice that of connectors) or spending it on undisclosed activities.

Table 3.

Police Finance Organization Reported Budgets.

Group	Metric	Count	Mean	SD	Minimum	Median	Maximum	Sum
Boosters	Expenses	84	$270,713	$693,303	$0	$131,953	$6,077,685	$22,739,914
	Net income	84	$87,167	$283,907	−$144,224	$20,801	$2,038,140	$7,322,009
	Revenue	84	$337,827	$857,854	$1,100	$141,340	$7,505,866	$28,377,471
Connectors	Expenses	39	$1,432,493	$2,814,643	$17,704	$343,100	$14,335,684	$55,867,228
	Net income	39	$61,189	$190,034	−$231,242	$14,234	$894,219	$2,386,386
	Revenue	39	$1,434,824	$2,781,262	$24,129	$326,589	$14,349,963	$55,958,146
Havens	Expenses	342	$1,016,616	$6,324,964	$1,434	$122,981	$110,456,950	$347,682,794
	Net income	342	$128,336	$1,124,576	−$1,773,170	$12,448	$18,929,764	$43,891,058
	Revenue	342	$1,158,147	$7,836,687	−$2	$143,307	$139,235,217	$396,086,264

Note: The data in the table include only the organizations for which we could verify reliable and consistent financial data (see “Data and Methods” section for notes on data reliability).

The average donation to a police haven was $22,243, while the median donation was $1,500. The average donation figure is skewed by a handful of large multimillion dollar donations. When they did report donations, police havens most frequently reported donating to other police havens (80 donations totaling just $5 million), creating a shadow network of internal financial exchanges. Despite limited transparency, our qualitative research uncovered that police havens are passing money, goods, and services to police through channels that allow the donations to go unreported on tax forms (see below analysis). As a result, the total amount of funding flowing to police from havens remains incalculable.

Among the three types, police connectors reported receiving the smallest amount of money from private donors, only $11.6 million. However, they gave the largest number of gifts to police departments, more than three times the number of gifts as police boosters (780 donations from connectors vs. 231 donations from boosters). As a result, their gifts to police are relatively small on average, with a median gift of $8,936. Connectors tend to be based in major cities and distribute their funds across the United States. Unlike boosters and havens, connectors often fund specific initiatives or items across departments, such as providing bulletproof vests to police canines or supporting police departments in their youth outreach initiatives. Unlike boosters and havens, which are often created by a single police department, connectors are frequently created by retired officers or police associations that have identified a common need among multiple police departments. Connectors live up to their name as they are the only type of police funding organization that gives to other connectors, boosters, havens, and the police.

Although police boosters received the lowest amount of reported private donations ($24 million), they give the most directly to police departments ($53 million). Most of their money boosters pass to police departments come from undisclosed sources. Police booster donations to police departments are much higher than that of police connectors, with a mean of $229,283 and a median of $15,800, and their operations are highly localized, often centered in suburban areas.

Table 4 describes the size and distribution of components in the network of donations in our dataset. It shows that the network’s largest connected component (see Figure 2) contains 92 percent of donations ($359 million) and 63 percent of organizations (4,650) in our sample, whereas its numerous isolated dyads comprise another 23 percent of organizations (1,668) but only 4 percent of donations ($15 million). The $359 million donations in the largest connected component include $285 million passing through police finance organizations and $71 million donated from connectors and boosters directly to police departments. These descriptive statistics illuminate a national network of private donors, police finance organizations, and police departments that are interconnected.

Table 4.

Size and Distribution of Network Components.

		Component Size
	Dyad	3–999	1,000
Percentage of components	75.20	24.30	0.10
Percentage of organizations	22.50	14.70	62.80
Percentage of donations	3.80	3.90	92.20

Figure 2.

Network diagram of the largest connected component.

The network diagram in Figure 2 visualizes the national network with donors, police finance organizations, and police departments as nodes and donations between these organizations as edges. The resultant network is extremely sparse, with 7,409 nodes and 7,439 edges and a density of 2.7 × 10⁻⁴. The network shape, composed of many interconnected hub-and-spoke patterns, is best characterized as a scale-free network: the median node is connected to only 1 other node, while the largest node is connected to 227 others. In other words, the average police funding organization is connected to just 1 other funding organization or police department, but organizations could be connected to up to 226 other organizations or police departments. The degree distribution fits a power law with exponent 2.5, indicating that although not all nodes are connected to a hub, the hubs still create short average path lengths between nodes (5.7). Thus, the high-degree nodes efficiently connect the sparse network. There are very few instances in which three nodes are mutually linked (average clustering coefficient is 5.1 × 10⁻³). This means that intermediary organizations rarely redonate funds to recipients that are already directly supported by the original donor, and funds do not circulate back to their source. The network does not show dense clique-like communities: rather it is composed of stars and short chains.

The national donations network is bound together by a handful of prolific police connectors and strategically networked corporate charitable foundations. These organizations form a dense core such that cutting away any single core node will not sever the network, but without which there would not be a dominant national component. On average, the removal of a police connector fragments the network into 9.8 more isolates and 1.8 more components than the removal of a random organization. The national network also consists of a set of less transparent elite funders using police havens to support police. These networks highlight the centrality of elite, nontransparent donors that are funding police at a national level. Beyond police connectors, the donations network is extremely sparse with the average haven or booster donating or receiving from only two other organizations. We identify 84 police boosters that donate to only a single department, effectively operating as private cash reserves for their intended departments. These boosters are not otherwise different from other police finance organizations in terms of their operations and size.

The network is also characterized by a high level of geographic homophily. The assortativity correlation coefficient (Newman 2003) at the state, county, and city levels are 0.6, 0.4, and 0.3. Although most of the network is connected into one giant national-scale component,⁷ the dyadic donation relations between police boosters and police departments is highly local.

How Money Moves

Because of our conservative definition of police finance organizations, the quantitative findings presented above likely underrepresent the full scope of these organizations’ activities. This undercount highlights a central feature of police finance organizations: they operate with significantly less accountability, regulation, and transparency than police departments. Additional qualitative analysis reinforces this finding. Typically, donations received by police departments have to be publicly disclosed. However, we uncovered four pathways among Chicago police finance organizations that allow for under- and unreported gifts to police departments. Through these pathways, police havens were able to support police without reporting any gifts and connectors and boosters were able to underreport their contributions to police. These four pathways are not exhaustive, rather, they illustrate some of the ways individuals or corporations have supported policing without being revealed as contributors. As such, these types of donations are not fully included in our prior quantitative analyses. The four pathways were (1) funding individual officers, (2) providing nonmaterial gifts, (3) facilitating discounted purchases by departments, and (4) free loans of equipment. These pathways reveal the hidden dimensions of private support for law enforcement and the limitations of relying solely on quantitative data from tax disclosures. By identifying these mechanisms, our analysis not only underscores the opacity of this financial ecosystem but also provides a roadmap for researchers to better investigate and understand the underreported ways in which private money influences policing.

Funding Individual Police Officers

Although police departments in the United States must disclose all gifts to the department, they are under no legal obligation to disclose gifts made to individual police officers. When it comes to gifts to individuals, nonprofits must only disclose donations greater than $5,000 to a recipient in a year. This leaves a gap that Chicago police finance organizations used frequently: providing gifts to officers that were less than $5,000 per officer. In 2020, the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation (CPMF) gave Chicago police officers 3,330 bulletproof vests and 1,720 vest covers at a total cost of $1,474,000 (CPMF 2020). CPMF rarely reports these gifts, but when they do they are gifts to “domestic individuals.” The vests, priced at approximately $500 each, fall below the reporting threshold and are disclosed in tax filings as gifts to individuals. CPMF gave 11,275 bulletproof vests to CPD by the end of 2020, but its tax forms over the years document giving only 2,845 vests to domestic individuals and none to CPD. In 2020, CPMF also gave 1,650 ballistic riot helmets at a cost of $905,662 to CPD at the request of the department, but these are also disclosed to the IRS as being gifts to “domestic individuals.” This practice underscores how police finance organizations leverage legal ambiguities to provide significant material support to police while avoiding scrutiny. By categorizing gifts as individual donations, these organizations obscure the scale and destination of their contributions, further complicating efforts to assess the influence of private money on law enforcement.

Nonmaterial Gifts

Charitable donations of cash and in-kind gifts have existed for many years, and the IRS has developed particular ways for nonprofits to disclose and assess the value of these gifts. Although we often found material gifts such as these disclosed on tax forms, we rarely saw gifts of knowledge, ideas, and data valued or disclosed as gifts to a department, despite their significant value to departments. This was particularly commonplace in the area of police training. For example, in 2018 the Chicago Police Foundation (a different organization and not related to CPMF) purchased “Special Classes for CPD.” They did not list this as a gift to CPD; instead it was purchased directly from the Strategic Policy Partnership that conducted the training. That this was disclosed at all was potentially a mistake: Chicago Police Foundation publicly discussed purchasing training for officers in most years of its existence, but only in 2018 did it appear on its Form 990, and still not as a gift to CPD. This suggests that police finance organizations can fund training initiatives without any formal public acknowledgment of their support. Similarly, the University of Chicago, through its Crime Lab, regularly shares data and insights with CPD. Yet this valuable data arrangement is not disclosed as a gift, further obscuring the ways police departments benefit from private contributions.

Discounted Purchases

Several police finance organizations have negotiated discounts with police equipment vendors or act as a third party that allows departments to purchase equipment at below market rates. Although this is equivalent to giving money to departments for these purchases, by crafting it as a discount, police finance organizations protect these gifts from public disclosure. For example, the Florida Sheriffs Association (FSA) has two separate programs that allow discount purchases. In its Cooperative Purchasing Program, the FSA has statewide contracts with vendors of vehicles and heavy equipment including armored vehicles, through which departments can purchase items at a discounted rate (FSA 2023a). The police department’s purchase is made between the department and the vendor, with FSA’s role unreported. In their 1122 program, the FSA serves as the point of contact between departments and the federal government’s large-volume purchases on counter drug, homeland security, and emergency response operations. The FSA reports department savings between 50 percent to 75 percent per item for purchases such as ballistic protective equipment, vehicles, drones, software, and crime scene equipment. These purchases would not be open to departments without FSA, yet FSA (2023b) does not report the money, in the form of department savings, as a gift. Other police finance organizations may pay a vendor directly to create a discount for a department or they may act as an intermediary for a purchase and underreport the value of the purchase in its public forms by reporting the discounted value instead of the fair market value (Ayling et al. 2009).

Free Loans of Equipment

Another tactic for evading transparency in private contributions is the use of free loans of equipment, where ownership remains unchanged. Unlike traditional donations, these arrangements do not meet the legal definition of a gift and thus avoid disclosure requirements. A donation is often defined by a change in ownership. If an object is given to someone for them to use, but the ownership never changes hands, it is not legally a gift. Like the U.S. military’s 1033 program that allowed departments to borrow military equipment for free, police finance organizations can act as intermediaries to facilitate the use of equipment without requiring formal reporting by either the donor or the recipient. For example, a private individual loaned a helicopter to the nonprofit Law Enforcement Aviation Coalition (LEAC) that LEAC then loaned to police departments at no cost. LEAC paid only gas and maintenance fees, allowing police departments to use the helicopter without ever having to report it as a received donation. Similarly, the private individual was not required to disclose the loan, as ownership was never transferred (Wiser 2010). Had the transaction occurred directly between the individual and the department, it would have required disclosure and may have raised ethical concerns about donor influence. The use of a police finance organization as an intermediary enabled the entire arrangement to remain undisclosed, avoiding potential scrutiny and ethical questions.

In sum, there are many ways that police finance organizations can transfer funds and equipment to police without having to report it or make it visible to the public. Beyond direct gifts of money through police finance organizations that already make the initial donor anonymous, the pathways outlined above also hide the organization’s role in providing direct transfers that support a department’s central policing functions. The frequency that these pathways are used reveal police finance organizations’ interest in keeping their funding secret. In Chicago, we found about 90 percent of organizations’ donations to police were not reported as gifts to police, and at least one of these pathways was used by every police finance organization we investigated.

What Police Finance Organizations Spend Money On

Our quantitative results revealed that police havens, the largest category of police finance organizations, received $396 million in revenue from 2014 to 2019 but available tax form data provided little insight into how those funds were spent. To gain some insight, we focused on havens and found that they frequently provided gifts—such as K-9 units, safety equipment, and trainings—that were meant to augment, not replace, public budget items. Unlike the large donors discussed below, only 12.2 percent of the police finance organizations we coded mentioned engaging in any political advocacy, and even fewer provided high-profile gifts such as firearms, militarized equipment, and advanced technology.⁸ Although these rare, headline-grabbing donations often dominate public discourse, recent work by Cheng (2024) and Rivera-Cuadrado (2023) highlight how seemingly mundane forms of resources controlled by police can be used to cultivate a coalition of political support for police within communities.

The most common gift we found in direct support of police was earmarked to supporting police K-9 units. Funding K-9 units (and some mounted patrols) served several stated purposes for police finance organizations. First, police finance organizations legitimized these donations by claiming that such items were excluded from standard police budgets and that their support was complementary to, not a substitute for, public funding. Second, K-9 units were frequently used as a powerful community relations initiative. Police finance organizations frequently funded K-9 demonstrations at local schools and community events. For example, the Newport News Police Foundation sponsored the Pennies for Puppies Reading & Writing Program, in which elementary school students “write letters to a K-9, adopted by their class. Members of the K-9 Unit visit the school. . . . Students collect pennies for the Police Foundation’s K-9 health fund, and learn, early on, to give back to their community” (Newport News Police Foundation 2022). These initiatives framed K-9 programs as educational and community-driven, fostering early goodwill toward law enforcement.

Another common category of purchases by police finance organizations included portable medical kits and automatic external defibrillators, bulletproof vests, helmets, and shields. In giving these items, many police havens lamented that departments did not fund these items out of the public budget, portraying their contributions as filling critical gaps. Police havens also used community-oriented rhetoric for medical equipment, arguing that the equipment was meant to be used on citizens that police come across while on duty. The bulletproof equipment, on the other hand, was about officer safety. Havens announced these gifts with language about how dangerous the job of an officer was and how their lives could be saved with the right equipment. Given the weight and importance police havens put on these purchases and the regret that departments did not fund them themselves, we expected the havens to lobby for public expenditures. However, we did not find a single instance of a haven lobbying or advocating for these items to be included in the public budget.

More than 50 percent of the police havens we coded mentioned funding training for police. As a nonmaterial gift, police finance organizations rarely directly provided a value of it on tax forms. Furthermore, most of these organizations did not communicate any details about the content of the funding. Although some of these trainings were likely mundane, given the tendency of some police training programs to promote aggressive, “warrior” mentalities (Simon 2023), the lack of transparency raises significant concerns about the potential influence of privately funded training on policing practices. Most police finance organizations funded a third party to do the training, many gave scholarships to officers to pursue training, and some finance organizations led the training themselves. Yet no matter how the organization procured the training, they rarely communicated the content of training. For example, the Chicago Police Foundation–funded “Special Classes for CPD” mentioned earlier were provided through the vendor Strategic Policy Partnership, which offers services ranging from technology applications to policing strategy development (Hillard Heintze 2019).

Large Private Donors

Our final analysis is of large private donors. The quantitative analyses revealed that the donor world was highly unequal; only a few donors accounted for the bulk of the money flowing through police finance organizations. We found only three private donors that donated more than $2 million to policing institutions from 2014 to 2019: Howard Buffett, Arnold Ventures LLC (formerly known as the John and Laura Arnold Foundation), and Kenneth Griffin. Through a case study of the largest private donors to police finance organizations (the Buffet, Arnold, and Griffin families), we show some of the motivations and goals behind these large donations.

Howard Buffett

Within our dataset, Buffett’s donations to police total more than the next 20 largest donations to police combined. This discrepancy is even more pronounced when examining donations to police departments and sheriff’s offices: Buffett’s donations to sheriff’s offices and police departments are both more than five times as large as the next 20 largest donors. The son of billionaire Warren Buffet has long held a fascination with policing and police officers. Buffett has been a frequent donor to law enforcement agencies across the country for decades, donating nearly $150 million to 115 local agencies in the past 20 years and hundreds of millions more to other law national enforcement agencies and police finance organizations (Kirsch and Boryga 2021). When he sought to influence police accountability in Illinois through direct relationships with departments, it raised ethical concerns and led to the ousting of the director of the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board (O’Connor 2021).

In Arizona, Buffett took a different tactic. A 2019 investigation in the Phoenix New Times found that “Buffett purchased the loyalty of—and influence over—the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) . . . through a steady stream of gifts and grants totaling tens of millions of dollars, used to buy guns, vehicles, surveillance equipment, helicopters, and other toys” (Hodai 2019). Many of these went through police finance organizations, such as the Cochise County Sheriff’s Assist Team. Buffett became an active member of the Assist Team, which gave him direct access to police without the same ethical concerns he faced in Illinois. Buffett also used donations to develop a closer relationship with the U.S. Border Patrol. Border Patrol agents permitted Buffett to join patrols and missions despite his not being a certified officer. This gave Buffett a unique vantage point from which to influence local policing policies and national border policy.

Kenneth Griffin

Donors such as Kenneth Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel, exemplify the challenges of tracing private donations to police. His contributions, routed through institutions that provide multiple layers of anonymity, are entirely absent from tax records. The only reason his gifts are publicly known is that Griffin himself chose to disclose them. However, further investigation into the mechanisms behind his donations revealed the extent to which private universities and other intermediaries facilitate anonymous contributions, underscoring how conservative our estimates of private donations to police may be and raising questions about private universities’ role in the world of police finance organizations.

In 2018 and 2022, Griffin gave a combined $35 million to the University of Chicago Crime Lab for two academies at the University of Chicago to train police and advance the technical capacity of CPD. Since 2018, the Crime Lab reported less than $1 million in transfers of money, equipment, and training to the police department, yet it has claimed to be successful in the goals of the 2018 gift of $10 million and was successful enough for Griffin to more than double his giving in 2022. Griffin has been an outspoken supporter of CPD and has frequently made these gifts a political issue that he has tied to mayoral, gubernatorial, and national policy. The announcement of the 2018 gift was made alongside then mayor Rahm Emmanuel, highlighting the political nature of the gift and its associated policy objectives.

Through a FOIA request, we learned about the institutions involved in making Griffin’s donation to the CPD possible. The gift agreement (Figure 3) stated,

Kenneth C. Griffin (“Mr. Griffin”), a donor to Fidelity Charitable, recommended that Fidelity Charitable make a grant to the University of Chicago (the “University”) of ten million dollars ($10,000,000) (the “Grant”) to support the University’s Crime Lab in assisting and furthering several important violence crime reduction initiatives that are now being undertaken by the City’s Police Department.

Figure 3.

Screenshot of Kenneth Griffin gift agreement to the city of Chicago obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by the authors.

Had Griffin chosen to stay silent about his donation, he would have had two institutions providing him anonymity. The first layer was Fidelity Charitable, a donor-advised fund that made the donation on Griffin’s behalf. On the basis of our tax return data, Fidelity Charitable reported making $13.8 million in donations to police finance organizations from 2014 to 2019. However, its tax records provide no details about the individual donors or the purposes of these gifts, obscuring the motivations and beneficiaries behind such funding. The second layer was the University of Chicago, a private institution not subject to FOIA and not obligated to disclose its private donors. This exemption means that even large, politically significant contributions, such as Griffin’s, remain hidden from public scrutiny unless the donor voluntarily discloses their involvement.

The Arnold Family

Billionaire couple Laura and John Arnold donated nearly $70 million to research and work on policing through their nonprofit foundation, which they converted to a limited-liability corporation in 2019. Unlike Buffett’s and Griffin’s investments, which were channeled through a variety of personal and private vehicles, the Arnolds’ funding came through their family foundation, making their giving public. The Arnold Family Foundation has a team of five full-time employees dedicated solely to the criminal justice research funding arm of the organization that seeks to improve “crisis response, research on gun violence, community safety, police accountability, and violence reduction.” Their stated goals reflect an ambitious policy-oriented approach. According to their Web site, the foundation supports

researchers and advocates to change state and local laws so law enforcement is more accountable to their communities. In our Community Safety work, we’re focused on rethinking the role of police and considering new approaches in Violence Reduction and Crisis Response. (Arnold Ventures 2023)

The Arnolds have been transparent about their interest in affecting policy outcomes, stating in an interview,

if we want to attack an issue, we will do whatever it takes. For us, the principle of it is unchanged. We’ve always wanted to change policies. We’ve always wanted to improve people’s lives. We’ve always defined success as sustainable change through policy. (Chronicle of Philanthropy 2020).

Despite this openness, the Arnolds have often funded police havens instead of funding police departments directly. In 2016, they funded a surveillance drone pilot program through a police haven supporting the Baltimore Police Department. Once the program was discovered by the community and the City Council, it was quickly ended, and the police haven was shut down (Dart 2016).

In sum, these three large donors, although having different motivations and different organizations for funding police, all sought to influence policing locally and/or nationally. They each used a different set of connectors, boosters, and havens to achieve their goals. Although they helped departments purchase policing tools, trainings, and research, their larger goals concerned ultimately changing police policy at the local, state, and national levels in ways that circumvented local democratic processes.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study offers the most comprehensive descriptive overview of police finance organizations to date, shedding new light on police privatization (Joh 2005; Sklansky 2006). We theorized three types of organizations that connect material resources from private donors to police: (1) connectors, (2) boosters, and (3) havens. Although previous research has focused on the triadic relationship between donors, police foundations, and police departments, our findings illuminate a more complex web of relationships between donors and police departments that illuminate several ways researchers can examine their effects. Moreover, the tax-reported funding we uncovered ($461 million in total police finance organization expenses from 2014 to 2019) far exceeds prior estimates, which documented $50 million in police foundation expenses from 2015 to 2017. These findings underscore the need for further research into private donations to police (Fernandez and Tremblay-Boire 2021; Fridman and Luscombe 2017; Walby et al. 2018; Walby et al. 2020).

The prior underestimation of private donations to police was, and continues to be, partially by design. We found that some police finance organizations obfuscated gifts through four pathways that allowed them to underreport their gifts. Our qualitative research also indicated that some of these donations to police were made explicitly to influence the police. For example, some of the largest donors such as Ken Griffin and Arnold Ventures, used their contributions to foster national connections and shape policy agendas at both local and national levels, with police finance organizations acting as enablers. The degree to which most donations are motivated by the desire for influence, however, remains an empirical question.

In finding patterns of obfuscation, national connections, and policy influence, our study builds on prior scholarship on the private funding of government and privatization of policing. The world of police finance organizations is one of low disclosure and accountability that offers wealthy, private citizens a significant opportunity to wield influence over public policy (Reckhow 2013). Although this influence is not an inevitable outcome of police finance organizations, the lack of transparency surrounding these organizations demands greater scrutiny.

Our findings also illuminate a variety of ways that future researchers can examine the effects of private donations to police with causal methodologies. Key questions include the following: Do private donations affect police behavior, crime rates, or public spending on police? How might the effect of a large dollar donation compare with the effect of a small dollar donation? Do effects vary by city size? Case studies using subsets of the GuideStar Candid data may enable scholars to test hypotheses, but missing data problems especially for years prior to 2014 limit the total number of time points available for causal estimation. Moreover, tax returns only list the year and not the date of the donation. Nevertheless, studies on public police expenditures offer examples of potential research designs using cities as the unit of analysis that, at the very least, can assess the association between private donations and outcomes of interest (Beck and Goldstein 2018; Carmichael and Kent 2014; Vargas and McHarris 2017).

As police havens formed the bulk of police finance organizations and their activity, it is worth noting that these organizations followed a similar structure and logic of tax haven off-shoring found by economic sociologists (Desai, Foley, and Hines 2006; Dharmapala 2008; Hoang 2022; Ogle 2017; Palan, Murphy, and Chavagneux 2010; Zucman 2015). Although the goal in this case was not to avoid taxes but rather public scrutiny, these findings highlight the strategic use of secrecy in privatized policing. Despite this secrecy, we have shown that police finance organizations, even those with high public disclosure, are connected to each other, play different roles, and use similar strategies and logics as they privatize policing in the United States. These flows of philanthropic relationships and organizational networks highlight an additional location for flows of dark money that can wield political and policy influence directly into the functioning of local governments (Mayer 2016). The complex, structured social world of police privatization shows that these logics, strategies, and knowledge can circulate and be used to direct future changes, policy, and movements (Walby et al. 2020).

Our policy recommendations primarily concern raising awareness of the need for considering government regulations to address the secrecy of these organizations and donations. Requiring more transparency would assist researchers and policymakers with performing rigorous evaluations of private donations’ effects on policing. Increased transparency can take on the form of states requiring organizations that donate to any public agency to disclose their donor list. Law enforcement departments and the IRS can also consider heightening disclosure requirements of gifts, especially gifts from organizations and not just private individuals. For example, to solve the underreporting issues outlined above, departments could require disclosure of (1) gifts officers receive that they use while on the job; (2) gifts of data, knowledge, and training; (3) the amount and means with which they receive any discounts on purchases; and (4) all loans of equipment. These policies would not prevent private money from funding police but would ensure the public is informed about these donations, allowing researchers to fairly evaluate their consequences. Greater transparency may also improve citizen perceptions of police legitimacy, particularly in a policy area as racialized, unequal, and contentious as policing. As such, addressing the secrecy surrounding private donations is not only a research priority but also a critical step toward fostering accountability in law enforcement institutions and trust in local governance.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Oriana Ballardo, Jasmin Becerra, John Cruz-Barcenas, Anna Fox, David Hackett, Caitlin Loftus, Sebastian Ortega, and Angela Zorro Medina for their support in collecting, organizing, and supporting this research. We also acknowledge the Rustandy Center for Social Innovation and GuideStar Candid for their support in data access and acquisition. Finally, we wish to thank Linda Zhao for her comments on the article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was made possible by a private gift made in the memory of Morris and Gayle Janowitz.

ORCID iDs

Simon Yamawaki Shachter

Robert Vargas

1

For example, one of the largest police finance organizations buys tens of thousands of bulletproof vests for police departments each year but has a mission of building and maintaining a police memorial. Under past classification methods, it would not be categorized as a police foundation.

2

Form 990 Header, Form 990 EZ Header, Form 990 PF Header, Form 990 Part IX, Form 990 Part III, Form 990 Part III, and Form 990 EZ Part III.

3

Form 990 Schedule A Part I, Form 990 Schedule I Part II, Form 990 Schedule F Part II, Form 990PF Part XV, and Form 990 EZ Schedule A.

4

Nonprofit organizations do not need to report their donors. However, nonprofit donors are usually required to report their donations. When the donor to a police finance organization is also an Internal Revenue Service–reporting nonprofit, we can use the Candid dataset to find it.

5

These rates refer to the entire Candid dataset of nonprofit filings between 2014 and 2016. Rates for our police-related subsample are likely similar.

6

Funders are either private foundations (i.e., organizations that receive most of their money from only a few sources, either corporations or individuals and families) or organizations that support police causes but that support is not their primary purpose or mission (e.g., community foundations or issue-based foundations, such as a children-supporting charity).

7

Networks with power-law degree sequences such as ours are guaranteed to consolidate into a giant component containing a majority of nodes (Aiello, Chung, and Lu 2000)—assuming all nodes are potentially connectable. These nonlocal donors are critical: without them the network would remain fractured into several smaller local components, which each retain the sparse, scale-free structure of the whole.

8

This activity took four major forms: (1) attending city council meetings; (2) personal meetings with city council members or mayors; (3) publicly taking a position on an active election or legislation, usually in the form of an published opinion by an organizational leader; and (4) writing and publishing amicus curiae briefs for active court cases. Although these initiatives were all pro-police, there was no evidence of systematic efforts, political strategy, or common policy initiatives, nor any evidence that any of the policy work was successful. The lone exception was an active and successful push by multiple Utah police finance organizations to pass state legislation increasing the criminal charges for the wounding or killing of police canines.

Author Biographies

Simon Yamawaki Shachter is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. He studies the relationships between nonprofit organizations and political institutions on contemporary issues and in the historical development of the United States.

Eric Chandler was a staff data scientist at the UChicago Justice Project, where he conducted research on police nonprofits and public safety narratives. Prior to his academic research role, he worked as a software engineer for seven years developing predictive analytics solutions. He holds a master’s degree in computational analysis and public policy from the University of Chicago.

Kiran Misra is a PhD student in the American politics subfield of Harvard’s Department of Government. Her substantive research interests include criminalization and the carceral state, disability, and race and immigration. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked as an investigative journalist and a consultant for the United Nations. She received both her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in public policy with honors from the University of Chicago.

Robert Vargas is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago

References

Aiello

William

Chung

Fan

Linyuan

. 2000. “A Random Graph Model for Massive Graphs.” Pp. 171–80 in Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC ’00. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

Alstott

Jeff

Bullmore

Plenz

Dietmar

. 2014. “powerlaw: A Python Package for Analysis of Heavy-Tailed Distributions.” PLoS One 9(1):e85777.

Anglen

Robert

. 2017. “Former Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, Ex-county Attorney Lando Voyles Subject of FBI Probe.” Arizona Central. Retrieved March 1, 2023. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/pinal/2017/03/01/former-pinal-county-sheriff-paul-babeu-lando-voyles-fbi-probe/98545958/.

Arnold Ventures. 2023. “Policing.” Retrieved June 23, 2023. https://www.arnoldventures.org/work/policing.

Ayling

Julie

Shearing

Clifford D.

Grabosky

Peter N.

2009. Lengthening the Arm of the Law: Enhancing Police Resources in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Beck

Brenden

Goldstein

Adam

. 2018. “Governing Through Police? Housing Market Reliance, Welfare Retrenchment, and Police Budgeting in an Era of Declining Crime.” Social Forces 96(3):1183–210.

Borgatti

Stephen P.

2006. “Identifying Sets of Key Players in a Social Network.” Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory 12(1):21–34.

Brandsen

Taco

Pestoff

Victor

. 2006. “Co-production, the Third Sector and the Delivery of Public Services: An Introduction.” Public Management Review 8(4):493–501.

Brayne

Sarah

. 2021. Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing. New York: Oxford University Press.

10.

Brecher

Charles

Wise

Oliver

. 2008. “Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Challenges in Managing Philanthropic Support for Public Services.” Public Administration Review 68(SI):S146–61.

11.

Bryson

John M.

Crosby

Barbara C.

Stone

Melissa Middleton

. 2006. “The Design and Implementation of Cross-Sector Collaborations: Propositions from the Literature.” Public Administration Review 66(SI):44–55.

12.

Carmichael

Jason T.

Kent

Stephanie L.

2014. “The Persistent Significance of Racial and Economic Inequality on the Size of Municipal Police Forces in the United States, 1980–2010.” Social Problems 61(2):259–82.

13.

Cheng

Tony

. 2024. The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

14.

Cheng

Yuan (Daniel)

. 2018. “Exploring the Role of Nonprofits in Public Service Provision: Moving from Coproduction to Cogovernance.” Public Administration Review 79(2):203–14.

15.

Cheng

Yuan (Daniel)

. 2019. “Governing Government-Nonprofit Partnerships: Linking Governance Mechanisms to Collaboration Stages.” Public Performance & Management Review 42(1):190–212.

16.

Chronicle of Philanthropy. 2020. “Pressing for Social Justice Is Essential, Says Laura Arnold, but Here’s What Makes It Hard for Megadonors.” Retrieved from https://www.philanthropy.com/article/pressing-for-social-justice-is-essential-says-laura-arnold-but-heres-what-makes-it-hard-for-megadonors/.

17.

Cordelli

Chiara

. 2022. The Privatized State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

18.

CPMF (Chicago Police Memorial Foundation). 2020. “2020 Annual Report.” Chicago: Chicago Police Memorial Foundation.

19.

Dart

Tom

. 2016. “Eye in the Sky: The Billionaires Funding a Surveillance Project above Baltimore.” The Guardian. Retrieved March 10, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/15/baltimore-surveillance-john-laura-arnold-billionaires.

20.

Desai

Mihir A.

Foley

C. Fritz

Hines, Jr.

James R.

2006. “The Demand for Tax Haven Operations.” Journal of Public Economics 90(3):513–31.

21.

Desmond

Matthew

Valdez

Nicol

. 2012. “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third-Party Policing for Inner-City Women.” American Sociological Review 78(1):117–41.

22.

Dharmapala

Dhammika

. 2008. “What Problems and Opportunities Are Created by Tax Havens?” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24(4):661–79.

23.

Fernandez

Kandyce

Tremblay-Boire

Joannie

. 2021. “Raising Money for Government and Connecting Community: The Isomorphic Rise of Nonprofit Police Foundations across the U.S.” Public Performance & Management Review 44(6):1422–54.

24.

FSA (Florida Sheriffs Association). 2023a. “Cooperative Purchasing Program.” Retrieved March 10, 2025. https://www.flsheriffs.org/law-enforcement-programs/cooperative-purchasing-program.

25.

FSA (Florida Sheriffs Association). 2023b. “Florida Sheriffs 1122 Program.” Retrieved from https://www.flsheriffs.org/law-enforcement-programs/purchasing/florida-sheriffs-1122-program.

26.

Fridman

Daniel

Luscombe

Alex

. 2017. “Gift-Giving, Disreputable Exchange, and the Management of Donations in a Police Department.” Social Forces 96(2):507–528.

27.

Garland

David

. 2001. The Culture of Control. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

28.

Gazley

Beth

Cheng

Yuan (Daniel)

Lafontant

Chantalle

. 2018. “Charitable Support for U.S. National and State Parks Through the Lens of Coproduction and Government Failure Theories.” Nonprofit Policy Forum 9(4):2018002.

29.

Hillard Heintze. 2019. “Hillard Heintze Acquires Strategic Policy Partnership, LLC and Expands the Global Scope of Its Law Enforcement Consulting Practice.” GlobeNewswire. Retrieved October 19, 2023. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/31/1708320/0/en/Hillard-Heintze-Acquires-Strategic-Policy-Partnership-LLC-and-Expands-the-Global-Scope-of-its-Law-Enforcement-Consulting-Practice.html.

30.

Hoang

Kimberly Kay

. 2022. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

31.

Hodai

Beau

. 2019. “Howard Buffet’s Border War: A Billionaire’s Son Is Spending Millions in Cochise County.” Phoenix New Times. Retrieved March 10, 2025. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/howard-buffetts-warren-buffet-son-border-war-cochise-county-11103225.

32.

Jain

Eisha

. 2015. “Arrests as Regulation.” Stanford Law Review 4:809–68.

33.

Joh

Elizabeth

. 2005. “Conceptualizing the Private Police.” Utah Law Review 2:573–618.

34.

Kirsch

Noah

Boryga

Andrew

. 2021. “How Howard Buffett’s Cop Fantasies Cost a Real Cop His Job.” The Daily Beast. Retrieved March 10, 2025. https://www.thedailybeast.com/howard-buffetts-cop-dreams-cost-a-cop-his-job-on-the-illinois-law-enforcement-training-and-standards-board.

35.

Lemos

Margaret H.

Charles

Guy-Uriel

. 2018. “Patriotic Philanthropy? Financing the State with Gifts to Government.” California Law Review 106(4):1129–94.

36.

Levine

Jeremy R.

2016. “The Privatization of Political Representation: Community-Based Organizations as Nonelected Community Representatives.” American Sociological Review 81(6):1251–75.

37.

Lippert

Randy K.

Walby

Kevin

. 2017. “Funnelling through Foundations and Crime Stoppers: How Public Police Create and Span Inter-organisational Boundaries.” Policing and Society 27(6):602–19.

38.

Loader

Ian

Walker

Neil

. 2001. “Policing as a Public Good: Reconstituting the Connections Between Policing and the State.” Theoretical Criminology 5(1):9–35.

39.

Logan

John R.

Molotch

Harvey L.

2007. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. 20th anniv. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

40.

Marwell

Nicole P.

2004. “Privatizing the Welfare State: Nonprofit Community-Based Organizations as Political Actors.” American Sociological Review 69(2):265–91.

41.

Mayer

Jane

. 2016. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday.

42.

Mazerolle

Lorraine Green

Ransley

Janet

. 2005. Third Party Policing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

43.

McQuarrie

Michael

. 2012. “Community Organizations in the Foreclosure Crisis: The Failure of Neoliberal Civil Society.” Politics & Society 41(1):73–101.

44.

Milward

H. Brinton

Provan

Keith G.

2000. “Governing the Hollow State.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 10(2):359–79.

45.

Mosley

Jennifer E.

Grogan

Colleen M.

2012. “Representation in Nonelected Participatory Processes: How Residents Understand the Role of Nonprofit Community-Based Organizations.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 23(4):839–63.

46.

Nelson

Ashlyn Aiko

Gazley

Beth

. 2014. “The Rise of School-Supporting Nonprofits.” Education Finance and Policy 9(4):541–66.

47.

Newman

Mark E. J.

2003. “Mixing Patterns in Networks.” Physical Review E 67(2):026126.

48.

Newport News Police Foundation. 2022. “Pennies for Puppies Reading & Writing Program.” Newport News Police Foundation. https://www.nnpolicefoundation.org/pennies-for-puppies-readingwriting-progam.html.

49.

O’Connor

John

. 2021. “Director Fired after Improper Law Certificate Given to Donor.” AP News. Retrieved March 10, 2025. https://www.apnews.com/article/illinois-warren-buffett-27c469723eb0e1228b6bbfb336639aa8.

50.

Ogle

Vanessa

. 2017. “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s.” American Historical Review 122(5):1431–58.

51.

Osborne

Stephen P.

Strokosch

Kirsty

. 2013. “It Takes Two to Tango? Understanding the Co-production of Public Services by Integrating the Services Management and Public Administration Perspectives.” British Journal of Management 24:S31–47.

52.

Palan

Ronen

Murphy

Richard

Chavagneux

Christian

. 2010. Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

53.

Pratt

Timothy

. 2024. “Atlanta Police Foundation Ignored Cop City Records Requests, Lawsuit Claims.” The Guardian, March 9. Retrieved March 10, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/09/atlanta-police-foundation-records-requests-cop-city.

54.

Reckhow

Sarah

. 2013. Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

55.

Rivera-Cuadrado

Wayne

. 2023. “Crafting Charismatic Cops: Community Policing and the Faulty Reputations Paradigm.” Social Problems 70(2):344–60.

56.

Schatteman

Alicia

Bingle

Ben

. 2015. “Philanthropy Supporting Government: An Analysis of Local Library Funding.” Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs 1(2):74–86.

57.

Sellers

Jefferey M.

2002. “The Nation-State and Urban Governance; Toward Multilevel Analysis.” Urban Affairs Review 37(5):611–41.

58.

Simon

John

Dale

Harvey

Chisolm

Laura

. 2006. “The Federal Tax Treatment of Charitable Organizations.” Pp. 267–306 in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, edited by Powell

W. W.

Steinberg

R. S.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

59.

Simon

Samantha J.

2023. “Training for War: Academy Socialization and Warrior Policing.” Social Problems 70(4):1021–43.

60.

Sklansky

David A.

2006. “Private Police and Democracy.” American Criminal Law Review 43(1):89–106.

61.

Smith

Steven Rathgeb

. 2010. “Hybridization and Nonprofit Organizations: The Governance Challenge.” Policy and Society 29:219–29.

62.

Stone

Clarence N.

1993. “Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy Approach.” Journal of Urban Affairs 15(1):1–28.

63.

Toepler

Stefan

. 2018. “Public Philanthropic Partnerships; The Changing Nature of Government/Foundation Relationships in the US.” International Journal of Public Administration 41(8):657–69.

64.

Tompkins-Stange

Megan

Brandtner

Christof

Bromley

Patricia

. 2016. “‘Walk the Line’: How Institutional Influences Constrain Elites.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 48:281–309.

65.

Tukey

John W.

1977. Exploratory Data Analysis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

66.

Vargas

Robert

McHarris

Philip

. 2017. “Race and State in City Police Spending Growth: 1980 to 2010.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3(1):96–112.

67.

Walby

Kevin

Lippert

Randy K.

Luscombe

Alex

. 2018. “The Police Foundation’s Rise: Implications of Public Policing’s Dark Money.” British Journal of Criminology 58:824–44.

68.

Walby

Kevin

Lippert

Randy K.

Luscombe

Alex

. 2020. “Police Foundation Governance and Accountability: Corporate Interlocks and Private, Nonprofit Influence on Public Police.” Criminology & Criminal Justice 20(2):131–49.

69.

Walters

Charles L.

2004. “A Multi-site Case Study Involving Ten Police Foundations: Examining Integrity and Ethics Relative to the Establishment and Maintenance of Best Practices.” PhD dissertation, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

70.

Wiser

Mike

. 2010. “Helicopter Agency ‘Valuable’ for Police, Expensive for County.” Rockford Register Star. Retrieved June 29, 2023. https://www.rrstar.com/story/lifestyle/public-safety/2010/08/15/helicopter-agency-valuable-for-police/44557783007/.

71.

Zucman

Gabriel

. 2015. The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Social Structure of Private Donations to Police

Abstract

Keywords

Private Funding of Local Government

Private Funding of Police

Data and Methods

Finding and Operationalizing Police Finance Organizations and Their Funders

Exploratory and Network Data Analysis

Coding How Police Finance Organizations Spent Funding

Results

Private Donations to Police

How Money Moves

Funding Individual Police Officers

Nonmaterial Gifts

Discounted Purchases

Free Loans of Equipment

What Police Finance Organizations Spend Money On

Large Private Donors

Howard Buffett

Kenneth Griffin

The Arnold Family

Discussion and Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iDs

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Author Biographies

References