I recently took about a dozen of these “police-support” calls to hear the pitches. The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t talking to live people; the answers all sounded scripted and recorded. In fact, former employees of these types of fundraisers have testified about how they used soundboard technology to play prerecorded messages as responses, in part so they could talk to several donors at once.
On each call, my questions about how donations got spent mostly went unanswered. Only one replied directly: 90 percent went to fundraising, and 10 percent went to police support. Wow! That means of a $35 donation, no more than $3.50 goes to their stated cause.
To find out more about these organizations, I probed the FEC website, where super PACs report their activity. I quickly identified over 70 super PACs with “police” or “law enforcement” in their names. I looked up one called Law Enforcement for a Safer America PAC, which seemed to be especially active, based on Nomorobo’s monitoring. It was raising money using four different police-oriented names (one “association,” two “coalitions” and one “support fund”). In the first half of 2021, this organization reported donations of $4.3 million; expenditures were just under $4.2 million, the bulk of this going to overhead — fundraising, lawyers, lead lists and…
