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Portrait of Private Policing: Interorganizational Police Donation Networks in the United State

Fri, Nov 15, 9:30 to 10:50am, Pacific H - 4th Level

Abstract

The privatization of policing has been linked to deleterious outcomes for disadvantaged groups and decreased state oversight of law enforcement. Despite police relying more so on private donations than ever before, few studies examine why organizations choose to donate money to police departments or the interorganizational structures that drive organizations to donate more money to some police departments than others. We capitalize on tax filings data for tax-exempt organizations between 2014 and 2019 to create a bipartite network between 12,795 private funders and 10,260 non-profits and their monetary donations to 4,643 police departments. We analyze the interorganizational police donation network with generalized exponential random graph models to represent the spatial, structural, and organizational-level characteristics that affect donation decisions and amounts. Our analyses provide insight to strong regional effects as well as network dependencies that guide donation decisions. Collectively, our findings suggest that in order to understand the privatization of police funding, it is necessary to not only account for donations to specific departments, but also the interorganizational network structures that guide police donation decisions.

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