Why 1033

During the period of the reforms, sheriffs serving counties with populations of less than 5, people received night vision gear, sniper tools, an LRAD , and numerous military trucks. And 31 MRAPs or other highly militarized vehicles have been distributed to sheriffs serving counties of less than 10, Like the requirement to demonstrate need, the civil rights provision of the executive order amounted to a requirement that law enforcement agencies attest to their own compliance with civil rights law; whether any agencies were ever denied transfers because of civil rights abuses is unclear.

For example, Baton Rouge police received a helicopter mere months after the police killing of Alton Sterling, and NYPD received two mine-resistant vehicles just a couple of years after the police killings of Akai Gurley and Eric Garner. If the changes implemented by the executive order constituted meaningful improvements to the safety and accountability of the program, then one might expect to see a corresponding reduction in transfers within the newly restricted categories of equipment.

One would also expect that agencies not compliant with civil rights law would be removed from the program and that agencies that have no real need of militarized equipment would no longer receive it. These charts show the number of rifles top left , controlled vehicles top right , and aircraft transferred through bottom per quarter. The period during which E. The number of military rifles sent to state and local law enforcement agencies plummeted to near zero before the reforms took effect and have remained near zero since The reforms did little to curb the dissemination of controlled vehicles and aircraft.

Yet when examining transfers over the three time periods, we do not see this expected pattern. Instead of a clear reduction, transfer patterns of restricted equipment under the Obama-era E. Transfers in three of the biggest categories of restricted equipment — military-grade firearms; combat, armored, and tactical vehicles, and aircraft — are displayed above. Rifle transfers dropped to negligible levels once the E. Militarized vehicle transfers spiked during the E.

And aircraft transfers experienced a temporary dip, but exhibited no clear pattern of significant decrease during the reforms period compared to the years before and after.

Like banned equipment, the equipment restricted by the E. By the end of the E. Today, state and local law enforcement possess more than 60, military grade rifles, 1, combat-ready trucks and tanks, unmanned ground vehicles functionally landed drones , and dozens of military aircraft, machine gun parts, bayonets, and even an inert rocket launcher.

Law enforcement attached to K schools, colleges, and universities have received millions of dollars of heavily militarized equipment. Eighty institutions of higher education currently possess seven less-lethal firing devices, six mine-resistant vehicles, an armored truck, another combat vehicle, shotguns and pistols, and assault rifles. In addition to our examination of the potential impact of the Obama reforms on the actual equipment provided to law enforcement agencies, we also reviewed the existing empirical research on the stated value of providing such equipment through the program.

Defenses of typically put forth the arguments that the program makes officers safer and saves taxpayer dollars. The actual data, however, tell quite a different story, and the studies Sessions touted have since been debunked. In , political science Professor Anna Gunderson and a team of scholars revisited the methodology and evidence behind those studies and detailed a number of fundamental methodological flaws, including that most such studies were inadequately granular to connect equipment to affected communities.

Because counties are often very large, including a number of distinct law enforcement agencies with distinct jurisdictions, an increase in equipment in one part of the county might happen to correspond with a decrease in crime in another, even though no causal effect is likely.

Conducting an analysis themselves using agency-level data correctly, the team found no effect between transfers and decreased crime. Another peer-reviewed study corroborated this finding, determining that receiving militarized vehicles had no impact on either crime rates or officer casualties.

This study was particularly powerful because it took advantage of the natural experiment created in when certain types of equipment were recalled by the E. Another rationale of the program is that by donating no-longer-used equipment, law enforcement agencies do not need to expend their own funds and thus the program saves taxpayer money.

Manually constructing a dataset of these law enforcement budgets from , we found no evidence that transfers decrease police budgets. In only one case did an influx of equipment correspond to an equivalent decrease in police spending in the following year.

In all other cases, either there was no reduction in spending at all or the size of the transfers dwarfed a nominal downward adjustment.

The real harms of the relatively unregulated transfer of military equipment to police forces continue to fall disproportionately on people of color. Since then, Congressional leaders have tried to reform or end this program that has caused an increase in militarized policing particularly in communities of color. In cities across our country, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators called for justice and accountability for George Floyd and the countless unarmed Black people that have been killed by law enforcement.

In response to the national outrage, armored vehicles, assault weapons, and military gear once again filled our streets and communities, turning them into war zones. Weapons of war have absolutely no place in our communities.

There are sincere and aggressive efforts in the House [12] and Senate [13] to severely curtail or end the Department of Defense Program. Millions of Americans have been calling for the Program to be shut down, with legislation introduced in both chambers to address these concerns. Thank you for your consideration.

Congress later passed the NDAA for fiscal year , which allows law enforcement agencies to acquire property for bona fide law enforcement purposes — particularly those associated with counter-drug and counter-terrorism activities. How many Law Enforcement Agencies are currently participating in the program? As of June , there are around 8, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies from 49 states and four U.

A law enforcement agency is defined as a government agency whose primary function is the enforcement of applicable federal, state and local laws and whose compensated law enforcement officers have the powers of arrest and apprehension. For a state to participate, the governor must appoint in writing a state coordinator, who is responsible for ensuring proper oversight of participating law enforcement agencies from that state. The MOA outlines the responsibilities, rules and regulations that must be followed for continued participation in the program.

A subsequent agreement called the State Plan of Operation must be signed between the state coordinator and any law enforcement agency that receives approval to participate in the program. The SPO can also be a method for the state to place additional requirements on the state-level program. The Governor-appointed state coordinators approve and certify law enforcement agencies in their state and work with agencies regarding program participation, to include the State Plan of Operation mentioned above.

Once in the program, a law enforcement agency is able to review online the available excess DoD inventory that is suitable for law enforcement and make requests for property through the state coordinator.

Law enforcement agencies do not pay for the property but must pay for shipping the items as well as potential storage costs. All excess DoD property is shipped "as is," and the law enforcement agency is responsible for all costs associated with acquisition, maintenance and costs to return the property when it is no longer needed. Who decides what equipment a Law Enforcement Agency can have? Per the Memorandum of Agreement, state coordinators are responsible for maintaining property accountability records, investigating any alleged misuse of property and reporting MOA violations to DLA.

After one year, general property becomes the property of the law enforcement agency. It is no longer subject to the annual inventory requirements and is removed from the LESO database. The vast majority of property issued to law enforcement agencies each year is non-controlled. In for example, 92 percent of property issued was non-controlled. Normally, small arms weapons make up about 5 percent and less than 1 percent of property issued is tactical vehicles.

But equipment can be a powerful gateway to all these cultural elements and the aggressive behavior they engender. The protests against police brutality, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, have reignited a discussion of police reform, including the demilitarization of police. Fellow Americans are not the enemy. We must stop providing weapons of war to police. Still, eliminating the is a step in the right direction.

AWS Deloitte Genpact. Events Innovation Festival. Follow us:. By Talib Visram 7 minute Read.