By Gavin Davis – Staff Writer
Local police departments using military grade equipment is not right. This issue became a hot topic after riots against police started breaking out in Ferguson, Missouri. Photos and videos of police officers in tanks and holding military grade weaponry went viral and showcased police brutality at its finest. However, police officers in Ferguson are not the only ones that have been given these wartime weapons. Because of the Department of Defense’s 1033 Surplus Property Program, nearly every local district in the U.S. has been granted military equipment. Over the course of eight years, the Pentagon has granted local police departments 200,000 ammunition magazines, 94,000 machine guns and thousands of armored vehicles. Even law enforcement in rural areas, where this equipment is near useless, find themselves with a surplus. And even though it serves no purpose, rural police departments find it impossible to return them. This is because the Defense Department finds that keeping their equipment in circulation is much cheaper than storing it themselves. Thus, they make the return process extremely slow and riddled with tedious paperwork. While forcing small, rural police departments to maintain and store military equipment should not be tolerated, the real problem lies in larger cities. In urban areas, this equipment actually gets to see some action. However, cheap storage cannot be the only explanation because one third of the wartime weapons sent to these places are brand new.
A better explanation could be that sending in this equipment is a deliberate strategy to fight the war on drugs. This could explain why nearly eighty percent of the paramilitary raids were to search homes, usually for drugs. If this is the case, the strategy has been extremely ineffective. As has been seen in Ferguson, the police have been doing copious amounts damage to a poor community. Furthermore, the relationship between the citizens of Ferguson and the police officers is completely destroyed. Contrary to popular belief, the aggressive policing can not be the result of a few bad police officers. When you arm even the most noble of officers with giant military grade toys and give them free rein, they will disregard their moral standing. The U.S. has to come together to find a solution to this problem, and quickly.
One possible solution is to encourage Congress to cut funding for these supply programs. Most local police departments do not need any heavy artillery, and the ones that do are using it inappropriately and, as a result, creating hostile communities. If the war on drugs in the main reason for these weapons being allocated, then there are much more efficient ways that the money can be spent. For example, the money could be put towards drug and mental health treatment. Additionally, state and local governments need to rein in the ability of police officers to raid people’s homes while using wartime weapons. It is hard to understand how the Pentagon could not see that when you outfit local police for war, unnecessary conflicts will arise.