Police Protective Fund Responds to Missouri Attorney General, Jay Nixon

For Immediate Release

June14, 2008

The Missouri Attorney General, Jay Nixon, released a statement yesterday which fundamentally and bombastically mischaracterizes the facts surrounding a lawsuit Nixon filed last year against a legitimate and long-serving 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Police Protective Fund, alleging outrageous behavior by individuals who staff the organization’s public awareness call center.

Nixon’s original pleadings accused PPF of some grievous activity, in addition to simple “Do Not Call” violations. Nixon alleged our organization employed disinformation, abuse, and strong-arm tactics as well as fraudulent statements to Missouri citizens.

Utterly surprised at such extreme allegations, PPF’s leadership responded with open hands. The surprise was legitimate: not only does PPF pride itself on carefully scrupulous education and solicitation practices, but also what we believed to be a strong working relationship with state Attorneys General, including Nixon’s office.

What was our basis for this belief? When complaints were filed with Nixon’s office, those complaints (four in the previous five years) were forwarded to PPF’s staff for review and resolution. We resolved every one of these complaints to the consumer’s satisfaction, forwarding the results to Nixon’s office.

It was therefore a shock to learn, by way of this lawsuit, that Nixon claimed to have over 900 “complaints” against PPF.

Facts Nixon elected not to make public:

• When PPF requested copies of the alleged complaints, his office produced less than half that number: 410 in total. Of these, nearly all were in the form of “Call Logs” provided by Nixon’s office to Missouri citizens.
• Furthermore, these “complaints” had been accumulated over a period of seven-years. Apparently, a particular division of the AG’s office, unknown to PPF, had been sand-bagging a wide diversity of consumer communications permitting Nixon to run up the numbers over a period of years to serve as fodder for a press release campaign that simplistically and deceptively mischaracterizes them all as “complaints” – while simultaneously denying PPF the opportunity to address genuine complaints in a timely manner.
• But most importantly: Of the 410 complaints eventually provided to PPF, only 85 (less than 21%) were from citizens who previously requested to be removed from our call list. The vast majority of the remaining complaints were from citizens under the mistaken belief that the state’s “Do-Not-Call” list extends to non-profits like PPF, which conducts its calling in-house.

[Legal Clarification: Non-profits that conduct their own in-house calling, like PPF, are legally exempt from state and national “Do Not Call” lists, but are required to maintain their own list of citizens who request not to be contacted. PPF refers to this as our “Opt-Out List” to distinguish it, for an understandably confused public, from the state and national “Do Not Call” lists.]

Other Facts Nixon elected not to make public:

• Nixon claimed that PPF raised almost $5 million but spent only $37,000 to support law enforcement, failing to mention that this sum was for only one of our several programs, and that our total charitable expenditure was around $2 million.
• Police Protective Fund is not a telemarketing company. We are a non-profit with a long-history of public works. Our call-centers are part of the organization’s ongoing public awareness efforts on behalf of “Proceed with Caution” — a program encouraging motorists to exercise caution when passing by “safety zones” or public safety officers on the road.

The Settlement

Ultimately, Nixon’s office backed away from the “egregious behavior” claimed in Nixon’s pleadings and press releases, and focused its lawsuit on the disputed violations of the Missouri law requiring organizations maintain what we refer to as an “Op-Out” list. Missouri’s law establishes a $1,000 per call penalty for violation.

Nixon contends, without statutory or case-law support, that even unanswered calls constitute a violation. While our staff was able to refute a good number of claims through the use of telephone records, the telephone company does not maintain records of uncompleted calls. Nixon maintained that all of the calls logged by citizens identifying PPF as a caller, presumably by Caller ID, were subject to fine. In the absence of any telephone records, PPF was unable to dispute these claims.

The AG and PPF were far apart in their valuation of the number of actual violations. To resolve this impasse, we negotiated a settlement by which PPF paid $450,000 over a three-year-period into a charitable fund for the benefit of Missouri law enforcement officers.

Considering the costs of litigation along with the uncertainty of a trial’s outcome, settlement under these terms presented the most acceptable alternative. Most important in our decision was the AG’s agreement to accept settlement monies for use in a manner consistent with our 501(c) (3) charter.

With regard to PPF’s ability to quickly identify and remove potential donors from our calling lists, our leadership instituted a thorough review of PPF’s calling procedures to include the installation of call-recording equipment for quality assurance and also to rebut spurious allegations. We have also revised our “Opt-Out” protocol and implemented a proactive approach to working with the various state AGs to guarantee that all grievances are dealt with in a timely fashion.

Historical abuse by a small number of aggressive tele-fundraisers has made dealing directly with citizen contributors an inherently delicate business, subject to critical and skeptical scrutiny from all quarters. PPF’s directors have embraced the challenge to improve our processes because they believe our mission is relevant and vital, and that our good intentions coupled with vigilance will serve a greater good.

To learn more about our organization or to contact us, visit our website at

PoliceProtectiveFund.org.