Since becoming New to Las Vegas a decade ago, I’ve taken an annual look at the Injured Police Officers Fund. That’s the home-grown 44-year-old Las Vegas fallen-cop tax-exempt nonprofit that raises and provides money to families of Southern Nevada cops injured or killed in the line of the duty. Especially when there is a police fatality, the Las Vegas news media often identifies IPOF as the official conduit for designated donations from public-spirited residents to grieving families.
To me, a national journalist who has written about charities and fundraising for decades, IPOF has stood out in sharp contrast to the morass of national faux charity political action committees sporting law enforcement names with shadowy non-police managers who essentially pocketed all the donations from cold-calling clueless donors. These outfits trolled incessantly for donor cash but spent virtually no money raised on their stated missions. You can read about many of them on this blog by clicking here or typing “faux charity” into the nearby search box. I think IPOF occupies a higher ground in this swamp, and overall does decent work, partly because it is cop-run on a volunteer basis, and not very pushy in its fundraising.
But although a million-dollar annual enterprise operating in the public interest, IPOF simply has not lived up to the promise of its relatively new president, Alexander Cuevas, a North Las Vegas police officer, to continue expanding transparency on how it functions. A recent IPOF move to shield its financial disclosures to the Nevada public, its hard-to-find most recent federal tax return, for 2024, and the organization’s own website raise some uncomfortable questions that the charity so far has declined to address in the seven weeks since I first started propounded them, despite gentle follow-up requests.
So I’ll detail my issues here. Continue reading
