Introduction: Dark Money and the Gift
This chapter sets out to conceptualize and explain issues of police sponsorship, police foundations, and other forms of dark money in policing. Dark money is the shadowy exchange of money and other resources to expand organizations and the political footprint of those organizations (Mayer 2016). Here, dark money refers to the expanding social, political, and cultural footprint of the police and the role of private and corporate money in that process. These developments in police resource acquisition are occurring during a specific juncture in history. We are seeing rapid development of third-party policing and private security (Ransley and Mazerolle 2009). We are seeing contests over policing whereby police are more aggressively attempting to display expertise and relevance (CÎté-Lussier 2013). We are also witnessing a social movement to defund and abolish police that broke through in 2020, but has roots in community struggles against police violence reaching back decades. There seems to be little question that police legitimacy is eroding. The police response entails boosting their image (Mawby and Worthington 2002), expanding their networks, as well as attracting, arranging, and even coercing more capital. We see police sponsorship, police foundations, paid detail services, and other forms of what we call dark money in policing, as more than an economic or financial issue. These issues are social and political too.
The main work conceptualizing dynamics of police resources in the 21st century is by Julie Ayling, Peter Grabosky, and Clifford Shearing (2009) entitled Lengthening the Arm of the Law. The book is an insightful exploration of the issue of police resources. Ayling and colleagues cover a lot of ground. They examine police as buyers of information, technologies, services, and discuss police as sellers of security and assurance. In a sense, police tout a brand, one that offers the promise of command and authority. Ayling and colleagues (2009) rely on the sociology and anthropology of the gift to conceptualize these exchanges. Relying on gift theory situates this work in a lineage of sociologists and anthropologists reaching back to Marcel Mauss. Ayling and colleagues conceptualize private sponsorship as gift giving, and they dig into those elements of sponsorship that can be conceptualized as such, exploring the benefits for givers and receivers of the gift. Ayling and colleagues (2009) acknowledge an element of coercion in these relationships. They invoke an element of power in their inquiry, but ultimately rely on an idea of ambiguous exchange. They use gift theory to explain exchanges of money and other forms of capital that are ambiguous or peculiar and which police must manage. From this point of view, the sponsorship that police receive is not normatively wrong or politically misguided. It is not really a social problem or a threat to democracy. It is not bad public policy or a slippery slope leading to corruption. It is merely ambiguous, and peculiar. The possibility of a conflict of interest apparently exists, but Ayling and colleagues do not pursue it to any extent.
There are many other works that extend the anthropology and the sociology of the gift, such as Godboutâs (1998) work with A. CaillĂ©. For Godbout and A. CaillĂ©, the gift creates what they call a âstrange loopâ in requiring future reciprocation. The gift creates reciprocal future indebtedness. In this sense, we have no problem with gift conceptualization. It is a useful explanation, and such exchanges are part of what we explore in the chapters that follow. Yet, we would contend that this gift framework is limited in several ways. Foremost, the idea of the gift in anthropology assumes a broader symbolic constellation of connected institutions that are committed to ensuring the success of one anotherâs future endeavours. In policing, this could be true to the extent private individuals and corporations and police have mutually shared interests and endeavours they wish to see continue. However, the gift framework leaves out many players and actors in these relations, such as those subject to police interventions and encounters (the public) and what they gain or lose in the process.
There is also a literature in criminology and other social science disciplines examining gifts to police and the potential for graft (Prenzler et al. 2013; Coleman 2004). However, this literature assumes that the gift is about the supply from donors or givers and that the rule of law is operating relatively unimpaired. The cultural, social, and political implications are not the focus. For us, the world of the gift is important to explore and books by Ayling and colleagues and Godbout and Caillé admirably deploy this concept. However, we offer an alternative approach to theorizing the relations involved in police sponsorship and funding to move beyond the assumptions of gift theory and extend the critical analysis of these dynamics. This alternative explanation is a needed one that is not only more critical but also accounts better for the institutional power relations such exchanges entail.
As Diphoorn and Grassiani (2016) argue, policing is never only about law enforcement and is always about a broader set of relations and networks supporting a specific political and economic order. Within these relationships, organizations attempt to collect and convert various forms of capital to extend and enhance their operations. The accumulation and conversion of this economic, social, and cultural capital help to replicate that organization and similar entities. They argue what is needed is a:
processual-relational approach that is based on the translation and conversion of other types of capital, such as economic and social, to acquire a position of power within a specific (security) âfieldâ (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2016, 430).
They refer to the overall process as securitizing capital. This approach obviously is indebted to Pierre Bourdieuâs understanding of social, cultural, and symbolic capital, the last of which refers to the conversion of any other form of capital. The concept of securitizing capital refers to âthe process whereby different security actors use various forms of capital, both intentionally and unintentionally, to acquire legitimacy and powerâ (431). As they argue:
symbolic capital, especially legitimacy and authority, is the one possible end result and that other forms of capital are translated and converted for this goal⊠different types of capital, such as social and economic capital, are mobilized in order to acquire symbolic capital in the field of security (436).
The police foundation, a key focus of this book, is central to these processes of capital attraction and conversion. While we appreciate the attempt to reach outside criminological theory (into anthropology) to conceive these exchanges, gift theory does not interrogate and destabilize these obscure flows and disreputable relations enough. Gift theory may also have to be contorted to apply to private funding of police. As a corrective or simply novel theorization, we draw from and apply greedy institution theory to all forms of private funding of police. The notion of the greedy institution better encapsulates the drive from inside a police department to accumulate social, economic, and political capital from outside it.
From Gifts to the Greedy Institution
Lewis Coser advanced the idea of greedy institutions throughout the mid-20th century in several now-classic sociological works. For Coser (1974), a greedy institution is one that seeks exclusive and undivided loyalty. Coser argues a greedy institution does not involve as much physical control as a total institution, famously described by Goffman (1961), or as found in totalitarian societies. A greedy institution is perhaps more suited to the modern era that values individual freedom and autonomy, but nonetheless manages and manipulates freedom and autonomy in institutional forms. For Coser, the greedy institution exercises power over individuals and over the relations of persons working or living in that institution. It does so without physical barriers, and through other measures designed to secure sustained inundation by the institution and enduring loyalty. The greedy institution also tends to sever relations with other bodies or organizations that will not conform to the greedy institutionâs worldview. At a psycho-social level, the greedy institution attempts to consume the mental space or worldview of the individual and replace it with its own.
Many types of institutions have been studied using the greedy institution framework. Some have argued the military is an exemplar of a greedy institution that severs member relations with other types of institutions and other persons and demands absolute loyalty and conformity to the martial worldview (Vuga and Juvan 2013). Others have argued the family exemplifies a greedy institution that demands conformity and promotes the primacy of itself among all individual members (Segal 1986). The idea of a greedy institution has not disappeared with the emergence of online forms of communication which seem to erode the primacy of big institutions in our lives (Cox 2016; De Campo 2013). The concept of a greedy institution still applies to many sets of relations in our world despite the proliferation of movements against modern institutions or the fragmentation of the modern social order (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991).
Police are a greedy institution. We are not the first to claim this. However, most literature on the police as a greedy institution has tended to focus downward or inward (Cox 2016). It has been an insular-looking framework focused on the individual members of the institution and their levels of conformity. The tendency in this literature is to examine how the greedy institution manages or manipulates its own individual members and assures loyalty and conformity within the institution (De Campo 2013). Literature on police socialization and police culture shows this loyalty and conformity being manufactured through police training and interactions and workplace practices and rituals. Norman Conti (2009, 2006) points to this system of shaming those who deviate from police culture, honouring those who remain loyal, and how forms of socialization in policing replicate this police culture to assure conformity to, and in essence, replicate the greedy institution. Police members are to abide by the police culture behind the âblue wallâ of silence. The greedy police institutionâs focus on individual members also sometimes entails a kind of moral regulation of officers as we show in Chapter Five on paid detail. Coserâs (1974) work predates the moral regulation concept, perhaps best explained by Hunt (1997) as governance of the self and others driven by knowledge of morality and risk, but some of what Coser says regarding greedy institutional practices is plainly about moral regulation of members. For example, Coser (1974, 15â16) suggests greedy institutions often attend to sexual attachments of their members and we show in paid detail there are rules about officersâ proximity to sexualized objects and spaces while on âeasy moneyâ assignments funded through those networks.
These are important works because Conti (2009, 2006) and many others writing about police culture show how this loyalty to policing is assembled through daily institutional practices in ways that create a uniform worldview to which police officers must be loyal or risk shame or ostracization. In this sense, police are an incredibly greedy institution; they demand everything of their members. This differs from a total institution because police officers are not physically threatened or restricted in the ways that someone might be in, for example, a mental asylum. The effect of the greedy institution can nonetheless be totalizing. Although there are mirages of choice and flexibility for the members of this police culture, as literature has explored, police culture leads to many problems such as institutionalized racism, sexism, as well as homophobia (Campeau 2015; Loftus 2010). This begins with police socialization (Van Maanen 1975) and is rehearsed and re-instilled in many ways through officersâ careers. It also leads to police corruption. As many scholars of police corruption have noted, its link to police culture is strong (Punch 2000), and the foundation of police corruption is the abuse of power with impunity.
Pointing to the role of police socialization in creating the conditions for replication of the greedy institution, Abby Peterson and Sarah Uhnoo (2012) examined police as a greedy institution in research on ethnic minority police officers as outsiders within police departments. They assert ethnic minority police officers are subjected to daily trials of loyalty that are difficult to endure and have a dual function. First, they continually test the minority officersâ loyalty and conformity to the greedy institution. Second, by doing so, these tests replicate the institutional form of greediness and perpetuate policing as an institution into the future. This is an important dimension of the greedy institutional framework, the idea of how police as a socially necessary institution is reproduced. For us, greediness begins with this tendency to demand conformity and loyalty of its members, and we explore this in relation to paid detail especially. But as we will also explore, and as Peterson and Uhnoo (2012) claim, the greedy institution requires its members to give preference and priority to participation in the institutionâs routines and how it organizes ideas and knowledge to underscore or make sense of that information. As we will argue, the networks of dark money that have emerged around policing in many ways extend this greedy institution. It is greedy in the sense that it demands conformity, loyalty, and replication of policing. It demands conformity of other organizations and their mandates to the policeâs own, not simply downward and inward for its own members, but outward into an expanding, extensive web of external persons and organizations. This is what makes policing and the issue of police resources one that befits the idea of a greedy institution. Second, it is a literal form of greediness too in that police demand more and more of the public purse and now corporate and other private money as well. The greediness seems to expand as well in ways we explore in later chapters.
Before further explaining this outward, extending view of the greedy institution in the policing field, we draw attention to Amanda Coxâs (2016) argument that greedy institutions are only able to secure such loyalty and conformity through the operation of frames or communication mechanisms. Cox reminds us that the greedy institution attempts to minimize participation in outside social spheres and minimize associations, among other organizations, and to limit the number of associations, channelling them to the greedy institution as a vital node. Cox argues the identity of the members starts to become shaped in the image of the greedy institution, that there is a promotion of a specialness, which becomes an element of the allure of membership. Finally, there can be trials of worthiness that can eliminate members who do not display loyalty and conformity (687). All these dimensions of the greedy institution are enabled by framing and communication. These ideas are not written down in a policing handbook. It happens through police communications inside the institution but as we will show, outside, too. Police communications are meant to manipulate the interest of listeners and audiences to agree with the police view of the world and treat it as legitimate in their own future actions. More attention needs to be placed on the mechanisms by which greedy institutions operate and are replicated, and this applies downward or inward and how internal loyalty is reproduced. However, as we examine in this book, there is no shortage of connections that police have outwardly in the community, in neighbourhoods, with the state and corporations. These networks become notable in the field of sponsorship, in the arena of exchanges that police foundations enable, as well as in paid detail policing. We underscore this phenomenon in this book, although we know much more research remains to be done...
