Organised crime networks have grown increasingly powerful. Criminal proceeds enable to hire expensive and skillful lawyers, consultants and (ICT)experts who help to sustain and develop the business of organised crime. As the criminal world is not playing by the rules, their toolbox consists of different methods that enable to launder and legitimize criminal proceeds and use corruption to influence decision-making processes.

At the same time the resources of the national law enforcement agencies – the police, the prosecutor´s office and the courts – are limited. The state budgets of the EU countries are constantly in deficit, and currently the EU countries increase their defense budgets rather than invest in the fight against organised crime.

On this background it seems extremely difficult to increase the effort to fight against the growth of organised crime. The common vision of police organizations is that crime should not pay, but how to achieve this? The Europol and GI-ToC reports show that financial crime is profitable and is therefore growing steadily.

A viable option to break down organised criminal networks seems to systematically confiscate criminal proceeds. Indeed, asset confiscation is a strategic priority in the European Union´s fight against organised crime. In Anglo-Saxon law, asset confiscation has a long history that began hundreds of years ago in England. Continental Europe, on the other hand, has different traditions and legal foundation. While the recent adoption of the EU directive on asset recovery and confiscation will increase the cooperation between the EU Member States on asset confiscation and sets some common principles, one important aspect related to the asset recovery is not regulated in the directive. Namely, whether and on which conditions the law enforcement agencies could use the confiscated assets. As the EU states are on the lookout of resources to both hold up their welfare states and necessary military capacities, using confiscated criminal assets to finance national law enforcement system seems a reasonable possibility that deserves considering.

However, even if we set legal aspects aside, this financing model - as any major reform in the public sector - may bring unexpected consequences. In order to make informed decisions and to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of using confiscated assets for the development of the police and other law enforcement organisations, I draw insights from the relevant public management and administration theories (e.g. principal-agent theory, collective action theory, motivation theories and public financial management theories). The theoretical section of the research will be complemented by case studies from 2-3 different countries where this financing system has been already introduced.

This study will analyze how philanthropic funding shapes public value creation in city police departments in the United States. Police departments in the US have been increasingly relying on police foundations, local nonprofits that channel corporate and individual donations to police departments, to gain additional revenue to support their operations (Fernandez, 2021).

Understanding the effect of privately funding police organizations merits special attention because the exercise of police force can significantly restrain the fundamental rights of citizens. Contributions from police foundations are largely invisible to public scrutiny since police departments are not usually required to disclose information on the size and use of donations to City Councils (Smith, 2023). Criminal justice scholars and sociologists have raised accountability concerns reporting corporate interlocks in police foundations, suggesting that police departments may be vulnerable to private interests (Lippert & Walby, 2017; Luscombe et al., 2018; Shachter et al., 2024; Walby et al., 2018, 2020). Nonetheless, there is limited evidence on how police foundations affect the behaviors of police organizations.

Public and nonprofit management scholarship suggests two alternative theoretical explanations regarding the relationship between private funding and public value creation. Government failure theory suggests that philanthropic support contributes to public value creation by enhancing the capabilities of public organizations, enabling innovative solutions, and meeting localized needs (Toepler, 2018). In contrast, philanthropic failure theory predicts that private funding of public services may lead to crowding out of public values (Salamon, 1987). For example, increased reliance on private support may lead public organizations to favor particular sub-populations that their nonprofit partners primarily serve (Cheng, 2019; Gazley, Lafontant, & Cheng, 2020).

This study attempts to test these two competing theories by analyzing how police departments respond to changes in police foundation donations. We measure police department behavior as the number of arrests per 100,000 people by type of crime and by race. Our analysis focuses on 242 large US cities over the 1989-2019 period. Large cities are defined as geographies with a place-level FIPS code and populations greater than 50,000 in 1989 that regularly report to the US Census’ Annual Survey of Governments (ASG). We combine financial and personnel data on city governments from the ASG, demographic information from the US Census and American Community Survey, crime data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), and nonprofit organization data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCSS).

In a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, Public Administration organizations in Germany, such as the police, face mounting criticism for their perceived inability to meet contemporary challenges effectively. Critics highlight these organizations' slow, rigid, and bureaucratic nature, calling for increased flexibility and adaptability, with agility proposed as a guiding organizational principle securing the shift towards a sustainable and viable public sector. Police organizations are often seen as epitomizing bureaucratic inefficiency due to their adherence to legality, proceduralism, and hierarchical structures, which, at first glance, appear antithetical to agility.

This paper explores one possible theoretical approach to the field of tension between bureaucratic and agile principles within the police, and argues that aforementioned critiques overlook critical aspects of police organizations. First, police organizations are not monolithic; they encompass a diverse range of tasks and resources, resulting in highly differentiated organizational entities, which operate in a variety of environments and under diverse conditions and resultingly do not homogeneously conform to bureaucratic standards. Second, despite their bureaucratic appearance, police organizations inherently possess agile characteristics due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of their operational environment.

The paper serves two main purposes: first, to provide a nuanced understanding of police organizations highlighting their significant agile features existing alongside bureaucratic elements, and second, to identify opportunities and needs for further enhancing agility within police organizations while

cherishing the existence and raison d'être of bureaucratic structures and processes. These considerations are grounded in contingency theory, positing that effective organizational design and management depends on aligning processes with environmental demands and suggesting that there is no universally optimal approach to designing and managing organizations. In this context, the paper argues that uncertainty emerges as a pivotal contingency factor influencing whether police organizations develop mechanical (routine, rigid, formal) or organic (flexible, adaptable, informal) structures.