New Documents Show Pentagon Rubber-Stamping Police Requests For Military Gear

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Molly Redden
@mtredden
NEW: Exclusive documents show hundreds of police departments requesting surplus U.S. military gear to police racial justice protests and do routine police work — traffic stops, warrants, and responding to domestic violence and people threatening suicide.

New Documents Show Pentagon Rubber-Stamping Police Requests For Military Gear
Police are citing racial justice protests and routine 911 calls to ask for armored vehicles built for a battlefield — and the Defense Department is buyin...
huffpost.com
10:26 AM · Aug 2, 2021

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/militarized-police-reform-joe-biden_n_6101967be4b000b997dd9429

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Under a Freedom of Information Act request, HuffPost has exclusively obtained hundreds of letters that local law enforcement agencies wrote to the Department of Defense in 2017 and 2018 making the case to receive an armored vehicle under the 1033 program.

The documents reveal that hundreds of police departments across the country, in communities of all sizes, are willing to deploy armored vehicles to carry out even the most routine tasks: making traffic stops; serving search warrants; responding to domestic violence; responding to people threatening suicide.

In these requests, law enforcement officials predicted they would roll out these vehicles into their communities 10, 20, 40, 70, or more than 100 times a year, and in situations that are not automatically dangerous. The sheriff of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, went so far as to assert that a police officer could die serving a notice of a civil lawsuit — and so his agency ought to have two armored vehicles.

“Deputies and police officers die every day performing routine assignments,” he wrote, echoing the you-never-know logic of hundreds of similar requests. “It is always better to have protection and not need it than to have none while in need.”

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