Police foundation governance and accountability: Corporate interlocks and private, nonprofit influence on public police
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895818794225 |
| Author | Kevin Walby,Randy K Lippert,Alex Luscombe |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895818794225
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2020, Vol. 20(2) 131 –149
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895818794225
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Police foundation governance
and accountability: Corporate
interlocks and private,
nonprofit influence on
public police
Kevin Walby
University of Winnipeg, Canada
Randy K Lippert
University of Windsor, Canada
Alex Luscombe
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Police foundations are new private organizations used by public police services to raise corporate
monies in North America. This article examines problems of governance and accountability arising in
relation to police foundations and police services. Drawing from interviews, freedom of information
requests and records from city archives, we analyze interlocks between corporations and police
foundations via board membership. Because of the influence and control directors exercise by voting
on projects and vetting other board members, links between corporations and police foundations raise
ethical questions about the power of board members to influence police spending and procurement.
We analyze data pertaining to four themes in literature on nonprofit organizations and directorate
interlocking: philanthropy; influence and control; cooptation; and reciprocity. In conclusion, we reflect
on the implications of our findings for literatures on public police governance and accountability.
Keywords
Board of directors, corporate interlocks, governance, nonprofit organizations, police
foundations, public police accountability
Corresponding author:
Kevin Walby, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada, R3B 2E9.
Email: k.walby@uwinnipeg.ca
794225CRJ0010.1177/1748895818794225Criminology & Criminal JusticeWalby et al.
research-article2018
Article
132 Criminology & Criminal Justice 20(2)
Introduction
Since the 1970s, public police services have been establishing private police foundations
to raise corporate and other private monies to supplement their public budgets. While
most organizational policies prohibit large, direct corporate donations to public police in
Canada and the United States, the creation of an arm’s-length, private foundation makes
accepting and soliciting such donations possible. We have identified over 200 police
foundations in the USA and shown that they are spreading across Canada too (Walby
et al., 2018). Police foundations comprise an appointed board of directors/trustees and a
management team consisting of an executive director and support staff. Corporations
channel funds to public police through these foundations, meaning that the directors and
staff of police foundations occupy a novel position in policing, wielding financial, and
sometimes operational, influence. While little research has examined the emerging phe-
nomenon of police foundations, issues of board structure, corporate interlocks and their
implications for governance and accountability are especially neglected.
The police foundation phenomenon is connected to debates in literature on private
sponsorship of public policing and donations (Coleman, 2004; Prenzler et al., 2013). In
the UK, police sponsorship commenced in 1994 and by 2013 was generating 1 percent
of police departments’ revenue (Loader et al., 2014: 476). Police–corporate sponsorships
have been established in police departments across the USA (Ayling et al., 2009), where
sponsorship is claimed to fill the void of declining tax revenues. The emerging role of
foundations, however, has not been a focus in police sponsorship literature. The issue of
police foundations also intersects with debates about police governance and accountabil-
ity (Mann, 2017; Stenning, 2009; Walsh and Conway, 2011), though police foundations
have not garnered attention in this literature either. Below we discuss the role of police
foundations in enabling police–corporate financing. We argue that inadequate govern-
ance of these emergent foundations and their relationship to public police threatens pub-
lic trust and confidence.
Since police foundations have yet to be fully explored in criminology and criminal
justice studies, we reach outside the field for additional conceptual insights and to guide
our analysis. First, we draw from studies of directorate interlocking in critical political
economy and organization studies. An interlock forms when individuals sit on two or
more boards concurrently, usually as an outside director (Carroll and Sapinski, 2011:
180). Research on corporate interlocks enriches understanding of private influence in
public policing (Crawford, 2006; White, 2014, 2015) by revealing how criminal justice
agencies begin to resemble business organizations, and how nonprofit boards can become
vectors of corporate influence (Alexander, 2003; O’Malley and Hutchinson, 2007;
Staples, 2006). Second, we draw from literature on the nonprofit sector and the different
roles that nonprofit agencies adopt (Fernandez and Hager, 2014; MacDonald et al., 2002;
Maier et al., 2016; Oelberger, 2018). Research on nonprofit agencies and their cross-
sectoral influence further reveals how the work of such agencies can influence dynamics
in criminal justice and public policing.
The expanding role of private police foundations in generating corporate funds for
public police raises questions about how these relationships are to be governed and
actors held accountable if instances of corruption are revealed. We begin by exploring
the issues of police foundation boards and corporate interlocks by introducing four
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