The New York Police Department now allows you to become a “Commanding Officer for an Evening”—that is, if you have the money to pay.
Over the last several years, hundreds of high-profile New Yorkers have participated in a program that allows them to accompany officers in task-force units, visit police stations, observe the counterterrorism division, and meet with top officials in the department.
The program is privately run by the “New York Police Foundation,” which was created in 1971 by business leaders to raise money from donors to then be handed over to the department. In short, while other public services are subject to the whims of local and state budgets, the police have an additional stream, around $6 million per year, coming from the wallets and checkbooks of the area’s ruling class.
Among the NYPD programs funded by the foundation are the “International Liaisons” program, focused on coordinating global intelligence, and the “Real Time Crime Center,” a state-of-the-art data warehouse, holding and searching “billions of records.”
Some of those invited to function as a “Commanding Officer for an Evening” come directly off the Crain’s New York Business Forty Under 40 lists, according to the foundation documents. The New York Times reports, “There is no limit to how much a donor can give, and the contributions—often exceeding $25,000, according to the documents—are tax deductible.”
While the foundation claims that there is no requirement to donate to participate in the program, “80 percent of the people, companies and nonprofit organizations that donated to the foundation from July 1, 2008, to last June 30 have been invited to participate.” (New York Times, April 26) Clearly, the chance to get a “taste of the action” is one of the perks for donating. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather spent two hours with officers searching for a robbery suspect at a public-housing complex in Manhattan.
The NYPD’s activities primarily consist of occupying and harassing the city’s Black and Latino communities, violating civil liberties, demanding identification from anyone they choose and arresting thousands on false pretenses. Last year alone, almost 600,000 innocent people were stopped and frisked in New York City, 87 percent of whom were Black or Latino.
Needless to say, the New York Police Foundation has not been inviting poor Black and Latino families to be Commanding Officer for an Evening.
Protecting and serving the rulers
Every New York City police car has the motto emblazoned on the side: Protect and Serve. This program makes it abundantly clear whom they are serving. Outside of Wall Street’s leading banks and corporations, you can find police officers on patrol to make sure no one disrupts the capitalist status quo. But if the police functioned to protect the community from the real criminals, they would be inside arresting the executives of the banks and corporations, who continue to steal from the public treasury and throw poor people out on the street.
The New York Police Foundation certainly presents all sorts of conflict-of-interest problems as it could help protect certain private citizens who have donated to law enforcement from investigations and criminal charges. But it also gives a clue as to for whom the NYPD really works. The department was founded in the 1840s out of private security forces that were raised to protect the city’s ruling class from the workers and poor. It has been playing the same role ever since.
