Obama curtails police military surplus program

What, no more free surplus bayonets and grenade launchers? Radley Balko:

According to NBC News, the new policy will stop “tanks and other tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and vehicles, firearms and ammunition measuring .50-caliber and larger, grenade launchers and bayonets” from being given to local police agencies.

Additionally, the new policy would attach some restrictions and conditions to the transfer of other equipment, “including armored tactical vehicles like those used in Ferguson, as well as many types of firearms, ammunition and explosives.” These restrictions include requiring the agencies to present “a clear and persuasive explanation of the need for the controlled equipment,” adopt community-oriented policing strategies, agree to “close federal oversight and monitoring overseen by a new federal agency with the power to conduct local compliance reviews,” train officers who will be using the gear, and keep data on how the equipment is used and with what results.

A spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police has already promised to fight the plan. Despite the changes to the 1033 surplus program, so far as I can tell, municipalities and states will remain perfectly free to purchase most of the named categories of equipment; they’ll just have to do so on the open market with their own money. Of course, once they are constrained to weigh such purchases against other uses of public funds, most will probably have little interest in doing so — which is part of the point we critics have been making.

Radley Balko himself deserves applause for having led the way on the issue of police militarization, both when he was at the Cato Institute and more recently as an independent reporter and Washington Post commentator, above all in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop. More of his work on the issue at Cato’s Letter (2013), at this video, and in a white paper on paramilitary police raids, as well as a general link to Cato’s work on the subject by many authors. I’ve covered the subject in many posts here and elsewhere, as well as in a podcast.

4 Comments

  • My only point of concern now is the creation of a new federal agency to oversee all this. It could go very well, and just be an auditing agency with periodic reviews of a sampling of agencies… But with the number of police forces, the amount of equipment out there and the desire to be thorough, my cynical side says it’ll be a huge agency with branches all over the country leading to the need for local governments to spend more money to hire compliance interface officers and spiraling in to a huge bureaucracy.

    • Duh. That’s kind of the point of any government agency. When you’re a small agency it’s too easy to blame one person and people get fired. Make it large enough and the blame gets spread around but only in an internal document that creates no real consequences but also means that you get to create an investigations department so… Yay, more jobs?

  • Under what legislation are police forces authorized to possess and use military weapons?

    • “The 1033 Program was created by the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 1997 as part of the U.S. Government’s Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services (DLA) to transfer excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies.”

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1033_program