Oil giants like Chevron and Shell seem to have plenty deep pockets when it comes to the police, according to a new investigation by the Public Accountability Initiative and its research database project LittleSis. The companies spend thousands of dollars each year lining the coffers of covert police charities in some of the same U.S. cities they’ve ravaged with pollution and disastrous climate change.
“Oil and gas companies, private utilities, and financial institutions that bankroll fossil fuels are all big backers of police foundations, which privately raise money to buy weapons, equipment, and surveillance technology for police departments, bypassing already outsized public police budgets,” the report reads. “These corporate actors — from Chevron and Shell to Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase — can be found serving as directors and funders of police foundations nationwide. Furthermore, these companies sponsor events and galas that celebrate the police and remind the public that police power is backed up by corporate power.”
For context, communities that bear the worst costs of the fossil fuel industry’s operations are also most endangered by violent over-policing. As Alexander Kaufman explained in the HuffPost, “Black Americans are one and a half times more likely than white Americans to breathe air polluted by burning fossil fuels, three times more likely to die from the lung and heart diseases that such pollutants cause, and six times more likely to be killed by police.”
Still, you might ask: why is Big Oil so gung-ho about policing?
“The same oil and gas companies, utilities and financiers that are polluting Black and brown communities in pursuit of profit are also funding and making alliances with the police,” Derek Seidman, a LittleSis researcher and report co-author, told HuffPost. “They’re allying and equipping the very apparatus that’s ensuring their uninterrupted profits.”
This wouldn’t be the first time the industry seemed to pull the strings of “law and order” on communities of color. As the pandemic raged earlier this year, states with heavy ties to fossil fuels rushed to criminalize the protest of oil and gas facilities like pipelines, which have an outsized impact on Black, Brown and Indigenous populations.
Big Oil’s funding of the police is especially damning because these same companies refuse to chip in a dime for the billion-dollar costs of adaptation, resilience and recovery measures needed to face the climate crisis they knowingly caused.
This is exactly why accountability matters. Big Oil put communities of color at risk — it’s time for the industry to pay to keep them safe.