Donor’s millions aid Las Vegas police, observers raise questions

The Metropolitan Police Department has an unlikely partner in its technology-backed crime fighting efforts, records and online posts show. It’s the co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz, from whom Metro has accepted a minimum of $7 million in donations.

Metro Sheriff Kevin McMahill and Horowitz said the donations, made through the nonprofit foundation that supports Metro, are making Las Vegas a safer place to live. But some experts say the close relationship between police and technology leaders could create a conflict of interest and an environment ripe for inappropriate exercises of power.

“It’s blurring the lines between the public and the private, which clouds the question of who the police are ultimately accountable to. Are they accountable to the public, or are they accountable to their donors?” asked Robert Vargas, a professor at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on the political economy of policing. “That question deserves to be answered.”

Horowitz, who is 58, according to Forbes, lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Felicia Horowitz.

According to Metro, the donations made by Horowitz and his wife have funded license plate readers, drones, upgrades at the department’s communications center and a 911 functionality upgrade. The drones and license plate readers came from companies that Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, invests in.

The donations were made through the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Foundation, a nonprofit that raises funds to support Metro.

Police foundations can act as a “way for companies to purchase their own technologies for a community,” said Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at Fight for the Future, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group.

This allows private donors to create a marketing point for their technology, an arrangement that serves as “the rule, not the exception,” Holland said.

But the connection between Metro, Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz is visible beyond these donations.

Horowitz’s email correspondence with Metro leaders shows that he was looped in as Metro began installing technology. This included the locations of license plate readers, which have attracted criticism, installed around Las Vegas in the summer of 2023. In one email, Horowitz inquired why Metro needed a certain number of drone stations per neighborhood.

McMahill, who told the Las Vegas Review-Journal he is proud of Metro’s “many public private partnerships,” spoke in person at a Las Vegas summit hosted by the firm in 2023 and sat down for an interview that aired on the firm’s YouTube Channel on Nov. 18.

“Thanks isn’t enough to the two of you, but it’s what I have,” McMahill told Horowitz and firm co-founder Marc Andreessen at the end of their interview.

In the interview, McMahill said the majority of Metro’s $1.5 billion budget is dedicated almost entirely to employees’ salaries and benefits — leaving little for the technological advancements he wants to make throughout the department. As such, observers note, private donations allow police departments to fund new technology when they may not be able to otherwise.

Why is Horowitz donating to Metro?

In a blog post published to Andreessen Horowitz’s website on Oct. 11, Ben Horowitz said that his donations to Metro, part of his mission to help Metro “become the most technologically advanced police department in the world,” were in part inspired by his wife’s experience growing up in Compton and Carson, California.

“My wife Felicia grew up in a very high crime area and saw many of her friends murdered. These murders may sound like statistics to some, but they destroy families and lives,” Horowitz wrote. “The key to making citizens, police, and suspects safer is better intelligence.”

In the blog post, Horowitz detailed the donations, which included a new gymnasium and amenities to help Metro retain 911 operators. He also made donations to purchase technology for the call center from one of the firm’s portfolio companies, Prepared911.

“I am thrilled to report that attrition is way down and 911 calls are being answered in 30 seconds,” Horowitz wrote.

While Horowitz said his motivations are to make Metro more technologically advanced, thereby making Las Vegas a safer city, experts said such gifts could potentially come with other benefits.

“It basically is buying you access to the police,” said Michael Collins, senior director of government affairs at Color of Change, a racial justice organization that published a report on police foundations in 2021. “They’re not doing this for free.”

A representative from Andreessen Horowitz said the firm declined to comment on its co-namesake’s donations, citing the firm’s October blog post as its statement on the matter.

Horowitz responded to a request for comment about his relationship with Metro by sending a link to his November interview with McMahill.

Metro said in an emailed statement that “Sheriff Kevin McMahill is committed to ensuring the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department becomes the most technologically advanced police department in the country.”

“Private donors funding technology helps advance LVMPD’s mission to reduce crime and increase the safety of our community,” the statement continued. “If we can envelop neighborhoods in a technology bubble, we can reduce crime and save people’s lives.”

Police foundations

Private donations to police departments through charitable foundations are common, said Kevin Walby, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg who co-authored the 2022 book “Police Funding, Dark Money, and the Greedy Institution.”

But as police foundations are charities, they’re not subject to the same disclosure mechanisms — such as open records laws — as public bodies, Walby explained. This lack of transparency is “part of the problem,” he said.

The gold standard of policing, according to Zack Smith, senior legal fellow at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, is that state and local governments would fully fund their police departments.

Introducing private funding into the mix raises concerns about how data collected by privately funded technologies is being used and stored, Smith said.

Neither Metro nor Horowitz responded to questions about whether he or his firm are able to access the data collected by the technologies Metro has deployed.

Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute, which promotes libertarian ideas and free markets, said that there are reasons to be concerned about privately funding police departments.

“When police are able to augment their own budgets,” Neily said, “then the public begins to lose control of what is an optimal amount of policing.”

Corporate involvement in police foundations isn’t limited to donations, according to Derek Seidman, a researcher for the public accountability initiative LittleSis. “Police foundations are spaces through which corporate power and police departments cozy up,” he said.

‘Tech guys’ and politicians

The relationship between Horowitz and McMahill, an elected official, “mirrors what’s happening more broadly in our political culture” as tech industry leaders develop relationships with prominent politicians, Walby said.

When McMahill made an appearance on Andreessen Horowitz’s YouTube channel in November, he spoke about his goal to create “technology bubbles” around Las Vegas.

McMahill said that around 75 to 80 percent of crime in Las Vegas occurs in 10 areas. “If we could envelop those communities in a technology bubble and make it virtually impossible to commit crime, think about all the lives we would be saving,” he said.

This was, McMahill recalled, the initial conversation he had with Horowitz. “That’s where you’ve been absolutely critical in helping us,” the sheriff told the venture capitalist.

Holland said she found it “odd for the sheriff to be spending his time on some tech guy’s podcast,” but that “that’s what a lot of these corporate actors want.”

Horowitz and Andreessen have spent a significant amount of time around politicians, the pair shared on an episode of ‘The Ben & Marc Show’ published on YouTube July 16, 2024.

Andreessen, who co-created the Mosaic web browser and co-founded Netscape, said in the episode that he knew former President Bill Clinton “a bit” and former presidential candidate Al Gore “quite well.” He had met Obama, whom he endorsed in 2008. Horowitz added that they had met with President Trump during his term in office, as well as “many White House officials.”

“We’re really kind of deeply embedded in politics,” Horowitz said on the episode. But when former President Joe Biden took to the Oval Office, he said the venture capitalists had been “unable to get a meeting with the president himself.”

“It’s just been really frustrating, I would say, and difficult,” Horowitz said of the pair’s lack of a sit-down with Biden. In the same episode, he and Andreessen announced their support for Trump in his 2024 campaign.

Can create ‘problematic incentives,’ expert says

Police foundations support departments with “less oversight and less scrutiny than the normal public processes that go into police budgets,” Seidman said.

Vargas said there’s “not a lot of hard evidence on what the actual consequences” of private donations can be. But what has been written suggests that private donations can “create problematic incentives for police departments to favor those who make donations to them.”

This can mean that technologies bought with the donations “get the benefit of the doubt,” Vargas said, rather than being vetted through a public process.

While private donations don’t necessarily dictate how local police departments operate, Vargas said they can constrain the options that police and other city leaders have at their disposal to tackle crime.

When it comes to police departments using private donations to deploy new technologies, questions are raised around who they are really accountable to: donors, or the public. The answer, Vargas said, is still unclear.

However, as time passes and private donations continue to pour into police foundations around the country, he said, the answer to that question is going to have “more and more consequences.”

Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estelleatkinson.bsky.social on Bluesky and @estellelilym on X.