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Police unions prey on public May 1, 2016
It is bad enough that two prominent police unions - the Police Officers Association of Michigan (POAM) and its satellite organization for police supervisors, the Command Officers Association of Michigan (COAM) - finance their political action committees (PACs) with donations from the public. What's worse is that they solicit those donations through repeated calls to our most vulnerable citizens, and over 80% of the money they collect goes to the firm that makes the calls and collects the money.
This has been going on at least since 2005.
POAM and COAM contract with Midwest Publishing Inc of Phoenix, AZ. In a report called "America's Worst Charities" published in 2013 in the Tampa Bay Times, Midwest Publishing Inc was among the worst of solicitors hired by charities. The study found that they keep on average 82.3% of what they collect, which is the case with POAM and COAM. The report says "Watchdog groups say no more than 35 percent of donations should go to fundraising costs."
Over a span of 12 months, callers from Midwest persuaded a retiree from Farmington to make the following donations:
The amounts of the above retiree's individual donations are higher than average. Most are between $15 and $20. More typical are the donations of this retiree from Alpena:
The donation information comes from campaign finance reports POAM and COAM filed with the Secretary of State. In all, there were 10 individuals who made 5 or more donations to either POAM or COAM in the period from 10/21/2014-10/20/2015. Many more donated 2, 3 or 4 times.
A total of 7525 donations were made, too many to list here. 6645 were to POAM and 880 were to COAM.
According to the solicitation letter Midwest sends when they are unable to reach someone who has donated in the past:
Here is what POAM and COAM reported for their PACS for the year 10/21/2014-10/20/2015:
The percentage of donations that go to Midwest is 83.2 for POAM, 80.3 for COAM and 82.9 for the two combined.
POAM made 37 contributions to politicians during the period. COAM made none. COAM has made no political contributions for the last 5 years. They've accumulated over $60,000. Maybe some day they'll figure out what to do with it. Over those same 5 years, they have paid Midwest nearly $111,000. Here is the complete list of COAM expenditures.
According to the solicitation letter mentioned above, POAM has 10,000 members. If, instead of pestering the public for contributions, POAM asked its members support the PAC, those $11,920 in political contributions could have been financed by a $1.19 contribution from each member.
The main purpose of the whole POAM/COAM PAC operation seems to be to make money for Midwest Publishing Inc. Why the members of these organizations allow it to go on is baffling. Maybe they don't know about it. Here is a list of member groups.
Is it possible that their leaders are getting kickbacks from Midwest Publishing Inc? Here are POAM's top 4 executive board members:
Next month, POAM members will have an opportunity to question board members about the financing of their PAC. The 2016 POAM Annual Convention will be held from Wednesday, May 25th to Friday, May 27th at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids.
Other Michigan police unions have PACs, too, but only 3 have significant contributions and expenditures and they are financed by their members, not the public:
All together, the political contributions made by these 6 police unions in the period from 10/21/2014 to 12/31/2015 totaled $77,429.61:
Those contributions are listed here.
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