Funnelling through foundations and crime stoppers: how public police create and span inter-organisational boundaries

ABSTRACT

Public police require a reliable supply of resources to operate effectively, and police increasingly seek resources from private organisations and individuals. Since police departments are public bodies, they encounter boundaries in doing so. The key challenge for public police is how to access private resources for initiatives while seeming to avoid real or alleged influence from private entities providing them. This article examines policing across inter-organisational boundaries and boundary negotiation by investigating two kinds of private organisations – police foundations and Crime Stoppers organisations – operating in Canadian jurisdictions, and which reflect significant trends in public police practices. Both organisational models were established by public police in the United States in 1970s, have proliferated, and now commonly operate adjacent to – but not within – North American police departments. Both models, and especially how they connect, create distance from, and otherwise relate to public police, lend insight into how boundaries are maintained, negotiated, and spanned. Implications of these arrangements for future research and the public good are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime stoppers
• police foundations
• boundaries
• public police
• organisations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In response to the sponsorship of Hamilton Police by a large pipeline company, Enbridge, the rule of law was central to the complaint about this arrangement signed by 350 citizens who also protested on the street (CBC 2013).

2. Nova Scotia’s police act provides legal authority specifically to account for ‘other money that comes into the hands of members of police departments’.

3. The RCMP Foundation also manages the RCMP Licensing Program that reviews products manufactured using the RCMP name or logo. Royalties collected are then redirected to the foundation and used to support community initiatives as well as youth and community policing projects.

4. These three representatives had been contacted by letter explaining the purpose of the research and indicating their confidentiality would be guaranteed. These interviews were not intended as a major data source for this paper.

5. One recent noteworthy modification to this narrative, compared to earlier versions displayed on a few Canadian CS websites, is addition of the claim that Greg MacAleese was ‘Canadian-born’, suggesting this program had Canadian and not exclusively US roots, presumably rendering it more acceptable to Canadians and helping its spread in this country among citizens whom would otherwise seek to distinguish the two crime control cultures.

6. London Police Association Charity Fund does not follow the corporate model of foundations and appears to be more philanthropic, giving most funds raised to agencies such as the Salvation Army and United Way. Interestingly, however, London Police Association Charity Fund gave London Crime Stoppers $1,000 in 2015, $1,500 in 2014, and $750 in 2013.

7. All values are CDN dollars.

8. For some programs this was 2012–2014 and for others it was 2013–2015.

9. Ottawa National Capital CS in 2010 approached Ottawa municipal government for the first time to request public funding, claiming that otherwise the program would ‘whither and die’ (Devoy 2010, p. 5). This request that came after the annual budget deliberations was ultimately rejected, but interestingly CS had suggested the requested ‘$100,000 be given to Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO), to give to Crime Stoppers’ (Devoy 2010, p. 5) showing an effort to obfuscate funding arrangements, perhaps to mask the public source of the requested funds later on.

10. A variation on this arrangement which obfuscates funding of CS on behalf of public police was evident in relation to the RCMP in Northern Alberta in the infamous case of serious vandalism of oil company field operations and the subsequent investigation of suspects Wiebo Ludwig and Richard Boonstra in the late 1990s. The head of the local RCMP detachment formed the ‘South Peace Crime Prevention Association’ for which he became a board member to raise funds from oil companies to transfer to the local CS program to encourage tips about these specific acts, rather than crime in general (Alaska Highway News 2000, p. 3).

11. Elsewhere we have argued (see Walby et al. 2017) that police foundations and similar entities should be added to the schedule of FOI laws to promote greater transparency and accountability.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 2015-86].