Community Fund Slammed Over Gift to Baltimore Surveillance Program

August 25, 6:44 p.m. The Baltimore Community Foundation issued a statement Thursday night correcting its description of the type of charitable money that was channeled to the Baltimore Police Department to pay for surveillance equipment. A spokesman for the fund had originally said the money was distributed by a donor-advised fund at the community foundation. On Thursday, he corrected that to say the money had not come from a donor-advised fund but from a fund for the police department for which the community foundation is a fiscal sponsor. That means it is responsible for ensuring that donations are managed appropriately and distributed according to donors’ intentions. While the money contributed by John and Laura Arnold did come from a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable, a section of the article that talked about the challenges community funds face when distributing money from donor-advised funds — and that quoted concerns raised by Boston College law professor Ray Madoff — was rendered irrelevant by the Baltimore fund’s correction and has been removed from the article.

August 24, 6 pm: This piece has been updated to include a response from John and Laura Arnold.

Critics slammed a foundation-supported police surveillance program in Baltimore, saying it was developed in secret and used money funneled through a community fund to do the bidding of wealthy philanthropists.

The Baltimore Police Department program, detailed in a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story, uses a Cessna airplane to patrol the skies above Baltimore for hours at a time, equipped with cameras trained on the city’s street grid. Through the program, people’s movements can be tracked and catalogued in an extensive archive.

Before the aerial-camera program was made public, the Baltimore Police Department had already been criticized by nonprofits for its surveillance activity in the city. Color of Change, an organization that promotes racial justice, is one of several groups that has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission for the use of “StingRay” telephone tracking devices.

Brandi Collins, a campaign director for the group, called the overflights an “outrageous” infringement on civil liberties. She questioned why private philanthropy would support the deployment of such technology — developed to fight enemies in Iraq — in neighborhoods with a majority of black residents.

“Why are people in our communities being treated like war criminals?” she asked. “I fail to see how this fits into any foundation model for how to make the world safer.”

Confronting Issues

Since the death in police custody of Freddie Gray in April 2015 and the unrest that followed, foundations have channeled millions of dollars to Baltimore nonprofits. The goal of one effort, “Baltimore Forward,” is to start “naming and confronting the underlying policies and systemic issues spurring the uprising and driving the divisions and disparities in our community.”

One of Baltimore Forward’s members, the Baltimore Community Foundation, supported the overhead-surveillance program. But the grant maker maintains that it did so only at the recommendation of two major donors: John Arnold, a hedge-fund founder, and his wife Laura, a former corporate lawyer.

The couple frequently make the annual Philanthropy 50 of the nation’s most generous donors. Directly and through their foundation, they have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to efforts involving health, education, the criminal-justice system, and other causes.

Through a spokeswoman, the Arnolds issued a statement saying, “We invest in a wide array of criminal justice issues and policies, including strategies for improving the clearance rate of criminal cases. One such strategy is to use technology to assist police in early-stage investigations. To that end, we personally provided financial support for the aerial surveillance tool being piloted in Baltimore. As a society, we should seek to understand whether these technologies yield significant benefits, while carefully weighing any such benefits against corresponding tradeoffs to privacy.”

Rather than support the project through their private foundation, the couple directed that the gift be made through a donor-advised fund account they had opened at Fidelity Charitable.

According to the Baltimore Community Foundation, Fidelity Charitable made a $120,000 gift to the community foundation’s Baltimore Police Foundation Special Projects Fund with the stipulation that the money go to Persistent Surveillance Systems, the company that operated the flights over the city. (The Arnolds’ website lists a gift directly to the foundation.)

Baltimore’s community fund is fiscal sponsor of two entities that support police activities with private money.

Payments to the surveillance company, according to a statement released Wednesday by the Baltimore Community Foundation, “do not emanate” from the same pool of donations made to the foundation for the purpose of improving life in Baltimore. The grant maker described itself as a “conduit” of the grant made through the Fidelity account. Rather than making decisions on where the money is spent, the community foundation said it was the fiscal sponsor of the police fund, meaning that it “provides fiduciary oversight, financial management, and other administrative services.”

[Four paragraphs, including comments from Ray Madoff, a donor-advised fund expert, have been removed here following the Baltimore Community Fund’s explanation that it is a fiscal sponsor, not a donor-advised fund manager in this case.]

Big Brother

The American Civil Liberties Union was alarmed by the development of a “Big Brother” surveillance system.

“It continues to be stunning that American police forces feel that they can use deeply radical and controversial surveillance systems, which raise the most profound questions about our society and its values, without telling the public that will be subject to those technologies,” wrote Jay Stanley, the organization’s senior policy analyst, in a blog post.

According the Arnolds’ website, the couple gave between $5 million and $10 million to the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation from 2008 to March of 2016.