The Washington Post’s Radley Balko received some interesting “unsolicited” emails fundraising for Armerica’s worst Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose federal contempt trial has ended and now awaits a judges decision. Mr. Balko explains that both emails had identical language and purported to be from Arpaio’s wife (Ava). Looking into the email, he noticed that the “fund” was being handled by a group called the National Center for Police Defense (NCPD), which boasts that any and all donations to the disgraced sheriff are 100 percent tax-deductible since they are a 501(c)3 non-profit.
There are non-profits that handle legal defense costs (i.e. ACLU), but Balko decided to ask a nonprofit law expert, Marcus Owens about this.
Owens says that if you’re facing criminal charges, you certainly have the right to set up a legal defense fund. Or a friend could do it for you. But donations to that fund are not tax-exempt, and the IRS would not let you get tax-exempt status. In fact, Owens says large donations may even be subject to an additional gift tax. Donors would give because they support you, or perhaps because they feel you’ve been wronged. But there would be no tax-based incentive to give.
The point is that to become a nonprofit that can do this kind of soliciting, one must prove that there is a mission which allows you to tie together the work you may do for someone like the disgrace we know as Sheriff Joe. The mission statement from the NCPD seems to have one: it’s a standard “blue lives matter” creed.
In today’s society when a police officer receives a call, he knows, he is no longer respected by the community or by the system that he swore an oath to protect and serve. These are not his friends and neighbors. Those he endeavors to help may be waiting in ambush for him. He is just a pawn in the game and continually at the mercy of the government. He knows each and every day when he leaves home that there is someone out there who wants to kill him, just because he wears a badge. When he puts that badge on he becomes a target, a target for groups that have sworn to assassinate Police Officers, and also a target for the system that he has sworn an oath to protect and serve.
I wonder how all of those grieving loved ones feel about these poor policemen who have murdered their children, husbands, wives, and daughters? According to Balko, the group has the veneer of being legit in that it boasts assistance to other police officers who have either already been acquitted or are soon-to-be acquitted.
So does that mean the group is legit? It might. But dig a little further, and it all gets murky again. According to Charity Navigator, NCPD received its tax-exempt status in December 2015. That’s about five months after a federal judge sent U.S. marshals to seize evidence from Arpaio’s office. It’s also about five months before the same judge held Arpaio in criminal contempt. In other words, the group was founded just as it started to become clear that Arpaio was facing some pretty serious legal troubles. According to the email sent out under Ava Arpaio’s name, NCPD has already given some $350,000 to her husband’s defense. (The email also included a photo of NCPD’s president presenting Arpaio with an oversize check for $250,000.) That’s interesting, because according to Charity Navigator, NCPD took in just $388,952 in revenue in 2016. Which means that in its first year of existence, NCPD gave about 90 percent of its revenue to Joe Arpaio’s legal defense.
Now there is a lot of wiggle room in non-profits and so this may not be illegal per se. However, Balko decided to figure out: who is the NCPD? Their website has no real contact info, no names, and did not respond to emails. The only person he could find was James Fotis, who used to run the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Here’s TIME magazine’s take on the crew, which they called “one of the country’s most mysterious political hit squads.”
How the LEAA pays for the campaigns is a mystery that political opponents, state officials and advocacy groups have fought unsuccessfully for years to unravel. The group, which has ties to the National Rifle Association but no public connections to official law enforcement agencies, has repeatedly gone to court to fend off such efforts. A dispute over whether the group violated Texas campaign laws is expected to wrap up this month, but the group’s donor list has so far remained a closely guarded secret.
[...]
The IRS said the LEAA has not filed mandatory forms with the federal tax agency since the ones that covered 2011 — something that could carry a fine of up to $50,000. The group also failed to release its tax records in response to the Center for Public Integrity’s requests, as required by law.
Even if the LEAA had filed the required documents, they likely wouldn’t have revealed much. Federal law doesn’t require a nonprofit like the LEAA, which is regulated under section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. Tax Code, to reveal the names of donors publicly or to offer many details about how it spends money.
Sheriff Joe already cost tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars and his “friends” are made from the same conman threads.