Mass. Law Enforcement Corporations Not At All What Privatizing Police Would Be Like

The Washington Post‘s Radley Balko
(formerly of Reason)
highlights a disturbing detail from the police militarization
report
recently released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
What happened when the ACLU made public records requests to various
Massachusetts law enforcement agencies, via
the Post:

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are
operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs.
These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given
geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is
usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. In
2012, for example, the Tewksbury Police Department paid about
$4,600 in annual membership dues to the North Eastern
Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC. That LEC has
about 50 member agencies. In addition to operating a regional
SWAT team, the LECs also facilitate technology and information
sharing and oversee other specialized units, such as crime scene
investigators and computer crime specialists.

Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated
as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into
problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the
501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not
government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from
open records requests. 

Corporatizing police forces looks a lot different than what
privatizing police services would  look like. In
Massachusetts, government (law enforcement) agencies are adopting
corporate status to dodge their obligations as “public servants.”
In privatizing a police force, local governments—or, gasp, even
residents themselves—replace their police departments, burdened as
they are by entrenched bureaucracies and systems of union-extracted
entitlements with contracted services. In this way, local
governments can dictate terms to how the local police force ought
to operate that contemporary union contracts often prevent them
from doing. A police service plagued by brutality and corruption
could be replaced. In any case, those private agencies would be
incentivized to provide the kind of services that will keep local
government and voters happy so that their contracts can be
extended—and not in protracted negotiations where government
representatives have an interest in providing sweet heart deals to
union bosses they rely on support.

Instead, we have police officers and their unions increasingly
demanding that police departments be held above the democratic
accountability expected of government. In Massachusetts they hide
behind corporate status to keep how many wrong doors they bust down
in commando-style raids a year. In Salt Lake City the police chief

bitches that residents have the audacity to question why a cop
shot a dog. In Seattle cops are
suing to free themselves of federally-mandated reforms—a
violation of their constitutional rights to things like reasonably
searching and seizing you they argue while Albuquerque cops, now
also subject to
federal oversight for their history of misconduct and abuse,
may be interested in
doing the same.