Law enforcementPentagon’s excess equipment makes local police resemble military units

In the early 1990s, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress authorized the Pentagon to transfer excess military equipment to law enforcement agencies across the country for use in counter-drug activities. Today, crime rates are at the lowest levels in decades, but following the withdrawal from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Pentagon is left with billions of dollars worth of military equipment that must be destroyed or passed on to other agencies.

Since the Obama administration came to power, police departments have received thousands of machine guns, camouflage and night-vision equipment; roughly 200,000 ammunition magazines; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars, and aircraft to add to their already well-stocked arsenals which often makes police departments resemble military units. TheNew York Times reports that local police forces are actually using this equipment in routine enforcement duties. In 2006, masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub as part of a liquor inspection, and in Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear drewout their guns on raids on barbershops that mostly led to charges of “barbering without a license.”

In Neenah, Wisconsin, residents are debating what many call the militarization of local police forces. The town is one of many which received a thirty ton armored combat vehicle built to withstand land mines. “It just seems like ramping up a police department for a problem we don’t have,” said Shay Korittnig, a father who spoke against getting the armored truck at a recent public meeting in Neenah. “This is not what I was looking for when I moved here, that my children would view their local police officer as an M-16-toting, SWAT-apparel-wearing officer.” Neenah’s police chief, Kevin E. Wilkinson, understands the concerns, but insists that the Pentagon-supplied equipment will help discourage potential attacks. “I don’t like it. I wish it were the way it was when I was a kid,” he said, but notes that the possibility of violence, however remote, required taking precautions. “We’re not going to go out there as Officer Friendly with no body armor and just a handgun and say ‘Good enough.’ ”

Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office in Indiana voiced his support for military equipment for local police agencies, claiming it will protect against possible attacks from veterans returning from war. “You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and to defeat law enforcement techniques.”

Some officials are pushing back against the influx of military equipment to local police departments. Neenah City Councilman William Pollnow has proposed that the council must approve all future equipment transfers. He adds that supporters of the Pentagon’s equipment transfer program say it helps protect police officers from potential threats. “Who’s going to be against that? You’re against the police coming home safe at night?” he said. “But you can always present a worst-case scenario. You can use that as a framework to get anything.”

Since the program’s inception, the Pentagon has transferred $4.3 billion worth of military equipment to local and state agencies, according to the Law Enforcement Support Office. In 2013 alone, $449,309,003 worth of military property was transferred to law enforcement.