Pentagon funnels $7.4B in surplus military gear to police

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-surplus-equipment-inspector-general-audit

by seigando • 6 years ago

59 74 6 years ago

taskandpurpose.com

adamsea2• 6 years ago

Yeah this is terrible. Cops no longer look like cops, the way cops look is like soldiers. Soldier-cops.

devwastaken• 6 years ago

Without any of the training, discipline or legal responsibility actual soldiers have.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

With looser rules of engagement than I had (USMC) in Afghanistan.

adamsea2• 6 years ago

Good point : ).

cyberbanjo• 6 years ago

I'm surprised this is downvoted.

Cops have been militarized pretty heavily, in the US

mjfl5• 6 years ago

This is not the case. Where I live and across the US, cops are wearing the same uniform they've been wearing for 40 years, driving the same cars they have for 40 years, and are armed with the same guns they've been wielding for 40 years. I haven't seen a single cop dressed like a marine in my entire life.

I think you may be thinking of SWAT teams, but those teams are only deployed in situations like bank robberies, hostage situations, school shootings, etc and they do not regularly patrol, do proactive surveillance.

yborg• 6 years ago

You must be living in Brigadoon or you live in a jurisdiction driving very old cop cars. Ford hasn't made the police Crown Vic in almost a decade, every force in metro Chicago now drives around in midsize SUVs. I don't see military style uniforms anywhere, but the Taser is now standard equipment in most departments so cops all sport those along with their service weapon.

My municipality got M16s from this Pentagon program some years ago, and at least some of the officers were actually pissed because it replaced the shotgun they used to carry and which was actually useful because it could load breaching shells to blow open doors, which was its most common use.

tertiary5• 6 years ago

but those teams are only deployed in situations like bank robberies, hostage situations, school shootings, etc

That's not true and is the reason people are upset. Nobody disagrees with the use of SWAT teams for school shooting and the like. However, that isn't how militarized units are used in real life. There simply isn't enough violent crime in most areas to justify a full time force dedicated to it. Instead, SWAT is used to target drug offenses (often times w/o an indication that there will be violence). In fact, the federal 1033 program (which funnels military hardware to the police) was founded to help fight the war on drugs.

The other big use of SWAT is for search warrants where they have replaced patrol officers in 80% of cases, the vast majority of which don't involve any suspicion that things will get violent.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/new-documents-r...

Ancapistani2• 6 years ago

Forty years ago, body armor wasn’t ubiquitous and most cops still carried .38 revolvers.

Today, vests and semi autos are by far the norm.

gotoeleven• 6 years ago

Mostly non-militarized police are the answer to the mostly peaceful protest.

nkozyra4• 6 years ago

Less-militarized, better-trained police are the answer to pretty much all of the police problems in this country.

alphabettsy• 6 years ago

Along with accountability, I think you’re right.

runawaybottle5• 6 years ago

I don’t see a problem with cops getting better equipment. I see a problem with cops being untrained to leverage the equipment and understanding which situations call for it.

No knock warrants in swat gear to handle local criminals might be a no no.

Can someone please link the bank robbery where some dude showed up in a bullet proof vest and. Ak47, where the cops literally lacked the equipment to handle the perp?

https://youtu.be/I_1IvZFwj0M

nkozyra4• 6 years ago

The problem with "better equipment" is it needs to continuously be justified. That means it needs to be used.

runawaybottle5• 6 years ago

Armored and heavily equipped cops are not what’s causing police brutality by and large. It’s your run of the mill guy with a simple handgun racially profiling and using deceptive tactics to drum up charges. We can keep our focus exactly where the issue is (for once we identified it exactly), or we can emotionally extrapolate it into the larger narrative.

Armored cops are a much bigger deal in China where the CCP uses them in places like Hong Kong to enact quasi martial law.

Turing_Machine• 6 years ago

The classic example here is Arlo Guthrie's song/story "Alice's Restaurant". For those who haven't heard it, the protagonists are guilty of littering, and the local cops wind up using dogs, tire-track analysis, and even aerial photography to make their case. As the song puts it, "They was usin' up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hangin' around the police officer station".

Recommended if you haven't heard it, or even if you haven't heard it for a while.

stfp• 6 years ago

It's not about training. A chainsaw isn't "better" equipment for surgeons. A tank isn't "better" equipment for police.

eptcyka• 6 years ago

Under what circumstances would a police department require an armored personnel carrier? Especially in a country that's spanning half a continent, with allies on both sides. And a potentially-soon-to-be has-been world superpower? Even if it turns out to be necessary or practical, it certainly won't be the solution to the problem that necessitates having an APC.

runawaybottle5• 6 years ago

A situation where 10 white nationalist militia members kidnap the mayor with stock bumped ar-15s.

Or when someone blows the window out of a Casino hotel and lays fire to a festival.

Or when the kids go nuts and shoot up the school.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but America has a unique mass shooting issue.

Running alongside an APC would at least give you cover in the Vegas shooting. I guess my point is, you cannot demilitarize one side one when the other side already militarized, that ship has sailed in America.

Edit: I’m getting downvoted on this, but I’d like to hear some counter points for these exact scenarios that happened (or almost happened) in the last 4 years.

ruined• 6 years ago

I've seen MRAPs/APCs deployed a few times, it's always during a protest, blockade, or occupation under attack. They may use them to drive over a barricade or into a crowd to force them to disperse, or just idle and crawl behind a line of cops with a sniper in the roof turret.

pnw_hazor3• 6 years ago

Sometimes they are used to breach walls of buildings to provide alternative entry points. They also are useful for providing bulletproof cover when a SWAT breaching/entry team is approach a building.

Though a department doesn't need many. And, they could be shared within a county or metro area rather than every department having their own.

djaque• 6 years ago

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

- Commander Adama

farseer2• 6 years ago

The American population is heavily armed so that comparison is not valid. You need police to be well equipped to handle a 300lb man in body armour and fielding an AR-15 style rifle.

rhino369• 6 years ago

See the North Hollywood Shootout for a good example of what happens if the cops are outgunned.

nkozyra4• 6 years ago

I think this is begging the question a bit.

We assume a lot of inevitables in this case, specifically that an interaction with law enforcement will likely end in conflict

oneplane• 6 years ago

So your solution is to just keep escalating?

tertiary5• 6 years ago

That's not true in the 80% use case of SWAT teams which is drug offenses and executing search warrants. This is the core argument for demilitarization, not the straw man of "I don't want police to have the equipment needed to respond to school shooters." Showing up with militarized teams to mostly non-violent situations just causes escalation after escalation and is why militarized units kill at a far higher rate than just the police alone.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

craftinator8• 6 years ago

You need police to be well equipped

No; no I don't. I need police to be better equipped upstairs, maybe take some queues from the British or German police.

A slim portion of the American population is heavily armed, and police don't deal with armed suspects in something like 99% percent of 911 calls. In that <1% of cases, we can call SWAT. That's why SWAT exists, to be a highly trained, militarized version of the police.

vsareto• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24745471

I'm starting to think it was more than just sitcoms

black62• 6 years ago

My Sheriff’s Department does not need an MRAP.

My town’s police officers do not need to wear IOTVs.

I prefer my local police forces to look like peace officers, not like they’re about to invade Grenada. The federal funding of municipality's law enforcement is just a kickback to the military-industrial-intelligence axis. The funneling of my tax dollars to purchase weapons of war to be used against the citizens.

rayiner2• 6 years ago

This equipment is deployed for SWAT teams and the like. European police have this gear too: http://mark.benedict.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/German-Sw...

throw0101a• 6 years ago

Do the security/police of European universities and colleges have MRAPs?

* https://reason.com/2013/09/19/ohio-state-university-gets-arm...

* https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ohio-state-university-ar...

Do European towns, with populations of 9000, have EUR/USD 1'000'000 vehicles that can stop 50-caliber rounds of ammunition?

* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/police-tan...

Larger municipalities having specialized units (marine, SWAT) is one thing; the question is why is having vehicles that can handle IEDs necessary, especially if they're smaller communities.

Also: why do some officers (in the US) go out on patrol in camouflage patterns? What kind of department allows that? What kind of mindset does a person have to be in to do that versus the 'traditional' all-blue that many people identify with police uniforms?

realityking• 6 years ago

Since you posted a picture of a German team I think it’s worth pointing out some differences:

- With very few exceptions (AFAIK only Stuttgart and Frankfurt) all armed police is only provided by the state and not municipalities

- This means special units, including technical units but also SWAT teams, serve a wide area. Often a whole state, in bigger state sizable portion of it

- The idea of a small town - or a college - police having their own SWAT team is completely foreign

- Normal police is already much more intensively trained than in the US. SWAT adds to this. SWAT is treated as expensive specialists, not a part time duty a cop can do on the side

As an example, I studied in Aachen. Aachen has no SWAT team. When one was needed it would come from Cologne (usually) or Düsseldorf. Both an hour drive away.

Now there are many structural differences between the US and Germany that you can‘t lift-and-ship the German approach to policing to the US but it’s disingenuous to imply German police is as militarized as American police because it also have SWAT teams.

deevolution• 6 years ago

The existence of the state is only possible because it controls a monopoly on violence. How else would it enforce laws? Do people think others will pay taxes out of good will? scoff

riazrizvi• 6 years ago

It would be interesting to hear the benefits of the 1033 program to the military, and how the tax payer is really bearing the pain here. Is the equipment being sold at a massive discount to market, it seems so, but to what degree? Why does the Pentagon do it then, does it boost military funding? Is this program effectively a mechanism to get updated equipment into the military? Are there line items on budget reports that say “we donated $1mm to local law enforcement so we need to be made whole”?

tertiary5• 6 years ago

Why does the Pentagon do it then

According to this [1] it was founded because of the war on drugs. It's purpose was very much to have militarized units that respond to drug offenses.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/new-documents-r...

pnw_hazor3• 6 years ago

US police need more funding and more training. Much more training. Even if some of their social service responsibilities are moved to civilian agencies, the police would still need more funding for training.

US Army Rangers which are only responsible for a fraction of what civilian police are responsible for usually deploy 3 months and train 9 months out of a year. When they don't deploy, they train 12 months out of the year.

In contrast, even though they have more duties than Army Rangers, US police hardly train at all after they leave their law enforcement academy and yet we demand perfection from them in all of their responsibilities.

The use of military surplus material could be restricted to SWAT or other special circumstances. But then the police departments would have to buy expensive purpose-built equipment rather than use cheaper/free milspec equipment.

Continuing to underfund the police will force them to cut training, seek low-cost sources of equipment (military surplus), and reduce their ability to investigate crimes.

Pentagon funnels $7.4B in surplus military gear to police

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