Funding Frontiers: Public Policing, ‘User Pays’ Policing and Police Foundations

This chapter explores the longstanding but surprisingly neglected ‘user pays’ policing, as well as newer and proliferating police foundations in Canada and the US. Many police departments in North America and beyond now offer ‘user pays’ public policing. The premise of ‘user pays’, as its name suggests, is that the public should not pay for private use of the public police. Those who use their security services for private benefit should pay, and the more they use them, the more they should pay. In practice, this involves selling security services to individuals and organisations for street festivals, funeral escorts, concerts, special parades, and retail establishments, and sometimes directly to private security firms themselves. These arrangements always entail uniformed officers providing security to these ‘users’ via temporary assignment.