Heron Marquez Estrada, Minneapolis Star Tribune (MN)
Reeling from the Frank Serpico corruption scandals in the early 1970s, the New York Police Department set up a foundation to accept charitable donations.
“We were formed to sort of be a hedge against police corruption,” said Gregg Roberts, vice president of the New York City Police Foundation, which was started in 1971. “Over the years we’ve raised over $60 million for hundreds of programs to improve public safety.”
The group bought the first bulletproof vests for the city’s police department and today it provides money for everything from harbor boats to bomb-squad robots, Roberts said.
The foundation raised more than $7 million last year. It is so successful that dozens of cities around the country have set up similar institutions -- and St. Paul and Minneapolis are in the process of doing so as well.
But most cities following the New York model aren’t using their foundations to combat corruption; they’re battling a new nemesis: budget deficits.
“Major city police departments have a hard time keeping current, especially with technology, given budget constraints,” said Renee Cunningham of the Seattle Police Foundation, which was created in 2000. That group’s goal is to raise $200,000 next year.
Foundations around the country are purchasing and donating to their departments everything from million-dollar mobile command centers to drug-sniffing dogs and patrol horses.
“It’s been great for our specialized units,” said Kristen Mahoney, director of grants for the Baltimore Police Department, which has received bomb suits, dogs and horses from the Baltimore Police Foundation.
In Minneapolis, which hopes to create its foundation by February, the money will go for an awards banquet and to buy gym equipment and refrigerators for precinct lunch rooms.
“We’re going to start small,” said Deputy Chief Tim Dolan of the Minneapolis Police Department, whose goal is to raise $150,000 to $200,000 per year. “We’re not talking about giving officers more money. We’re not talking about giving officers more toys.”
St. Paul city officials will incorporate their foundation by the end of this year and announce their plans in December.
St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington, who proposed creation of the foundation as he was competing for the chief’s job last summer, said at the time that he hopes to raise about $500,000 annually.
The foundation will start soliciting funds next year, which Harrington said could support officer training, school scholarships and equipment, including possibly a boat to patrol the Mississippi River.
“There is a great opportunity to involve the broader community in helping to support our police department,” said Mayor Randy Kelly.
Separation of powers
St. Paul will follow the New York model, which emphasizes an independent board and a clear separation between foundation fundraising and police department operations.
“You need that separation,” Roberts said. “That’s a fundamental operations guideline. You can’t be seen as a slush fund for the department. You need to be a properly run nonprofit.”
Most police foundations do not have politicians on their boards and they do not include the police chief in the decision making. Police officials submit grant proposals, but the boards decide which projects are funded.
Most foundations also have strict policies designed to guard against conflicts of interest. And they generally avoid providing badges, stickers or anything else that can be used to publicize a link between a donor and the police.
“We don’t give out badges or get-out-of-jail-free cards,” said Baltimore’s Mahoney.
Some foundations, such as Seattle’s, don’t even publicize their list of donors, so officers and police administration are not aware of who contributed or how much they gave.
“We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t even the appearance of anything that would raise eyebrows,” Seattle’s Cunningham said. “We don’t even give board members anything that has a police logo on it.”
The other big fear, as with most nonprofits, is of embezzlement or other forms of fraud.
Thus far, police foundations have been immune. But there have been some instances in which foundations were almost tainted by financial scandals.
In Baltimore, the police commissioner who started the city’s foundation was convicted of fraud last year. He was jailed for spending money from a secret police fund on liquor, Victoria’s Secret lingerie and his mistress.
“People were calling,” Mahoney said. “It caused people to say, ‘Just where did that money come from that he spent at Victoria’s Secret? Was it foundation money?’ It wasn’t.”
In New York, after the Sept. 11 attacks a former Kentucky police chief created the New York Police Foundation and illegally collected hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It took us almost a year to shut him down,” Roberts said. “In the world of nonprofits, specifically the world of law-enforcement fundraising, there are always shady characters. In New York, you got somebody calling you every night.”