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Hard Sell Fraternal Order of Police supporter shield
Mercedes was startled when she picked up the phone on a recent evening. “It was someone calling from the police, speaking Spanish and asking for money,” she recalls through a translator.
When the cops come looking for cash in Mexico, you don’t say no. Mercedes—a Mexican native who did not want her real name used in this story—is pregnant and relatively new to this country. The person on the other end of the line said they were from the Tennessee Fraternal Order of Police and wanted a donation to help cops who’d been injured in the line of duty. Mercedes felt awkward refusing a request from the police. She agreed to send $20 and felt good about helping out.
Later, when she found out that only about $3 of her donation actually made it to the FOP, she felt robbed.
“They’re stealing from people by playing on their sense of duty,” she says.
The Tennessee Fraternal Order of Police, a charity organization that operates independently from any law enforcement agency, appears to be targeting Hispanics for donations using direct mail and dinner-hour telephone requests for cash.
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To that end, they have hired one of the largest—and some would say most notorious—telemarketing companies in the country to make the calls and send the letters.
The firm, New Jersey-based Civic Development Group (CDG), takes 85 percent of many donations it receives on the Tennessee FOP’s behalf. The company has been cited by the Federal Trade Commission for “deceptive acts” and has been the subject of numerous state investigations for the way it does business, especially the percentage of contributions that it keeps from donors.
Now CDG is calling and writing Tennessee’s Hispanics en español, asking them to give till it hurts.
Unlike native-born Americans, however, some immigrant families are reluctant to just hang up the phone when the police come calling for contributions.
“They don’t feel comfortable saying ‘no’ to the police,” says Yuri Cunza, president of the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. What’s more, the FOP solicitors will call the same home again and again, say Cunza and others who have been targets. “The recurring nature of the phone calls creates pressure, and these families feel that it’s coming from law enforcement,” he says.
Cunza also cites the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office’s new power to initiate deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants who have been arrested, even for minor traffic offenses. “For the undocumented, traffic stops now have dramatic consequences,” he says. “I find it interesting that in return for donations you receive an FOP supporter sticker or badge to display on your vehicle. It’s an excellent mechanism to entice a community to contribute.”
There is also a bit of irony at work here. At least one cop in Nashville—Juan Borges, who helps lead the Nashville Police Department’s “El Protector” Hispanic community liaison program—is an English-only proponent. He once told The Tennessean that if you don’t speak English, “you don’t have the right to complain” about the way things are done here in the U.S. of A.
While the FOP is a nonprofit that’s unconnected to any law enforcement agency, the charity does provide attorneys for cops who are sued because of on-the-job incidents, and it gives death benefits for widows and orphans of police killed in the line of duty. It has 73 local chapters and nearly 10,000 members, according to its website. The FOP also employs lobbyists in Nashville and Washington, D.C.
At some point, the Tennessee FOP teamed up with CDG, which sets up local call and mailing centers to solicit donations on behalf of police and firefighters across the nation. It is unknown exactly when the Tennessee FOP hired the company because the charity did not return more than a half dozen-phone calls requesting comment.
What is known is that CDG keeps a large part of each donation it raises for charity. In Tennessee, the FOP is guaranteed 15 percent of gross collections, according to a CDG official. That means that when a generous Tennessean makes a $10 donation to the FOP, only $1.50 of that money actually goes to buy bulletproof vests or legal counsel for police officers. The rest goes straight to CDG.
This practice of keeping large chunks of donations has made the company less than popular with charity watchdogs. According to newspaper reports, it has been the subject of more than 20 state investigations, some of which resulted in fraud lawsuits. Though the company never admitted wrongdoing, over $700,000 dollars in settlement cash was paid to various plaintiffs as of 2005.
One such case was brought by the state of Connecticut in 1995. The state alleged that CDG misled potential donors about who exactly was to receive their donation. CDG settled the suit by paying a $40,000 penalty and agreeing to set up a “do not call” list, according to the Connecticut attorney general’s office.
The company has also come under federal scrutiny. In 1998, the Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint against CDG saying the company lied to consumers about where exactly their donations were going.
At the time, CDG was soliciting on behalf of the American Deputy Sheriff’s Association. According to the Federal Trade Commission, CDG told prospective donors that their gifts bought bulletproof vests and paid for death benefits for local cops. Turns out that the money was not being given to “law enforcement offices in the city, county, or state in which the consumers reside[d],” as CDG telemarketers and mailers suggested. The complaint does not specify where exactly the money ended up, but given CDG’s history and documented business practices in states from New York to Oregon, it’s a good bet that at least 80 percent of the donations were kept by the company.
The feds issued an official reprimand to the company, saying CDG used deceptive practices in violation of federal law.
In at least one case, CDG’s practices went from deceptive to threatening.
In 2004, a Utah woman told a local television news reporter that she wanted to make a cash donation to the Utah FOP but that the CDG telemarketer demanded a credit card number. The woman, who is identified only as Sandy in the news report, refused to give the CDG employee her credit card number and hung up the phone.
The telemarketer called back. When Sandy didn’t answer, the CDG telemarketer called again.
“If I get the answering machine one more time,” the CDG employee says as Sandy’s answering machine recorded the message, “I’m going to send an officer to your doorstep.... I’m going to hang up and call back, and you’d better pick up this next time.”
Sandy didn’t pick up and the CDG telemarketer kept calling, finally threatening to send a SWAT team to the woman’s house if she didn’t make a donation to the Utah FOP.
“Good job, Sandy,” he says in one of his last messages. “You just struck out. It’s over. There will be a SWAT team on your doorstep in about five minutes.”
Two months after Sandy’s story ran on the local TV news in Utah, the CDG employee who stalked her for a donation was still employed by the New Jersey company.
The Scene made numerous calls to the CDG call center in Charleston, W.Va., which handles solicitation for the Tennessee FOP. The English-speaking people fielding calls there were courteous and more than willing to explain the difference between CDG, the charity for which they worked and the police that protect and serve our community.
Not everybody seems to be getting the message.
“When they called me, I thought I was helping out the police,” Mercedes says. “It feels a lot like robbery and deception.”