"Demilitarizing" The Police Could Be A More Fruitful Rallying Cry For Reformers Than Defunding

The civil unrest that erupted in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., drew attention to the heavy militarization of local police departments. The police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, was never charged with any crime. But one consequence of the conflagration was an executive order by then-President Barack Obama to significantly curtail a Pentagon program that had transferred billions of dollars’ worth of equipment originally intended for overseas combat to local law enforcement agencies.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear sometimes gives people a feeling like they are an occupying force as opposed to a part of the community there to protect them,” Obama said as he announced the changes in May 2015, following the recommendations of a working group he appointed after the fires went out in Ferguson. “Some equipment made for the battlefield is not appropriate for local police departments.”

President Trump signed an executive order in August 2017 to rescind Obama’s restrictions on what is known as the 1033 program, allowing once again for the military to provide bayonets, grenade launchers, .50-caliber ammunition and other equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Police unions widely praised the move, which was championed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

This helps explain the ubiquitous images of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, also known as MRAPs, deployed during nationwide protests of police brutality after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody on Memorial Day.

These tactical vehicles, designed amid the Iraqi insurgency 15 years ago to withstand IED attacks, have been cruising around American cities, often accompanied by officers who are armed in ways that even infantry veterans of the global war on terrorism find themselves taken aback by.

Stopping the steady stream of battlefield equipment into American cities will not solve systemic racism, but many criminal justice reformers see demilitarizing local departments as both an essential first step to restoring public trust and a far more realistic goal than the rallying cry among some protesters to “defund the police.” Many Democratic strategists worry that calls for defunding the police will create political headaches, especially in swing states and the suburbs.

“What police departments need are techniques and training for deescalation. Giving them increasingly dangerous and powerful weapons of war moves us in the opposite direction,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview last week. “There is no evidence at all that the police in any of these situations have been outgunned. The idea that the solution to what's happening across the country is to arm ourselves to the hilt, and then essentially point those weapons in the direction of citizens, is preposterous.”

Schatz tried last year to recalibrate the 1033 program, partnering unsuccessfully with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to insert an amendment into the annual National Defense Authorization Act. They plan to try again this year.

The Justice in Policing Act, unveiled by congressional Democrats on Monday with more than 200 co-sponsors, would ban chokeholds, establish a national database to track police misconduct, prohibit certain no-knock warrants and scale back liability shields for police officers in civil and criminal court. The 134-page measure would also ban the Defense Department from transferring military-grade weapons to law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels. The measure would specifically stop the Pentagon from providing bayonets, silencers, grenade launchers, grenades (including flash bangs) and other explosives. The Democratic proposal also bans the military from giving MRAPs to domestic law enforcement agencies, as well as armored or weaponized drones and long-range acoustic devices designed to disorient enemy combatants.

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a Marine veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, considers this “one of the most absurd programs in the United States government” and he’s pushing to abolish it in any criminal justice package. “It pains me when I see police acting as if they are soldiers,” said Gallego, who represents the Phoenix area. “They must be seen as interwoven into the fabric of our communities — not as a foreign force — but that is the only image I see when they roll through our streets with more armor than I, and those I served with, had in Iraq.”

Former vice president Joe Biden has signaled that he would restore Obama’s restrictions on the 1033 program if he is elected in November. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said that a law should be passed by the end of this month “to stop transferring weapons of war to police forces.” Speaking in Philadelphia last week, Biden said: “No more excuses. No more delays.”

Sessions, who is competing in a GOP primary to win back his old Senate seat in Alabama, attacked the Obama-Biden administration for not just making it harder for local authorities to obtain military-style equipment but also recalling equipment that had already been transferred. “They were basically trying to suggest that the police departments are threats and not to be trusted,” Sessions said during an interview last week. “I've not seen any real complaints of them abusing their equipment. They're just pandering, in my opinion, to the anti-police mood. … I don't think Vice President Biden has a clue about how to safely maintain a big city like Philadelphia or Baltimore.”

The Defense Department has been heavily criticized for faulty record-keeping, but government data show that more than $7.4 billion of materials has been transferred to local law enforcement departments since the program started, and more than 8,000 agencies have benefited.

The constellation of groups backed by billionaire industrialist and libertarian donor Charles Koch has also ripped the program as unnecessary. “The 1033 program improperly treats communities like combat zones, rather than our shared neighborhoods, while inducing fear and suspicion between the public and the police,” said Will Ruger, the vice president of policy at the Charles Koch Institute. “We certainly want police officers to have the gear they need to keep themselves and us safe from violent criminals, but do the police officers in our cities and towns really need bayonets, grenade launchers … and camouflage uniforms?”

Ruger emphasized that overhauls to the policing system need to go far beyond ending this one program. The Koch Institute, Stand Together and Americans for Prosperity are working to replicate the kind of coalition that helped smooth the way for the bipartisan passage of the First Step Act in 2018. Officials representing the groups say that their three priorities will be transforming police culture, so that there’s more transparency on recruitment, training, tactics and police union contracts; addressing structural barriers to good policing by restricting civil asset forfeiture, limiting immunity for officers and reducing the incentives to give out tickets or make arrests; and “eliminating unnecessary criminalization,” so that homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse are treated more as social ills than problems for police.

The origin of this program dates to 1990, when the federal government wanted to put military surplus to good use after the Cold War and, particularly, to give local law enforcement agencies better tools to fight the war on drugs. Section 1033 of the NDAA in 1997, where the program gets its name, expanded the equipment made available and removed the requirement that it be used for drug interdiction. The program grew immensely after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Tom Clark, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, said it is hard to research the long-term effects of the transfers because the record-keeping was so bad in the years before Obama’s executive order in 2015. “As a consequence, a lot of the social science analysis that’s been done has rested on really flawed data that are problematic,” Clark said. “We have revisited previous studies using newer data, and our analysis suggests there’s no evidence the 1033 program leads to a reduction in crime rates.” He added that local police departments also buy military-style equipment directly from suppliers, adding to the battlefield look of city streets over the past two weeks.

Lindsay Koshgarian, the program director for the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, said the 1033 program has been “terribly ill-advised” because it has incentivized using military-style equipment for law enforcement functions that don’t benefit from having it. “Police departments can ask for almost any piece of military equipment and get it with little scrutiny,” she said.

In 2017, investigators from the Government Accountability Office were able to obtain $1.2 million worth of items, including night-vision goggles, simulated rifles and simulated pipe bombs, by creating a fake law enforcement agency. The Pentagon has said it fixed the problems that allowed this to happen.

Wayne McElrath, who led the GAO investigation and is now a senior investigative adviser at the Project on Government Oversight, suggested several reforms to the program. “States that have a pattern and practice of discrimination should be suspended and/or excluded from the 1033 program,” McElrath wrote in an email. “Additionally, a justification should be required for existing equipment to be maintained if a pattern and practice of discrimination is substantiated. To minimize the negative effects of surplus military equipment on community policing, Congress should put further restrictions on the 1033 Program that exclude the use of surplus equipment (weapons, vehicles, devices) from typical day-to-day policing and protest control activities. This specialized equipment should be exclusively for high-risk warrants and arrests.”

Princeton political scientist Jonathan Mummolo found in his own 2018 study that militarized police units tend to be more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, "even after controlling for local crime rates." He did this by using a geocoded census of SWAT team deployments from Maryland. Using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, Mummolo also showed that "militarized policing fails to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime." Furthermore, he used survey experiments to illustrate how seeing militarized local police in news reports may diminish the reputation of police departments in the eyes of the public. “In the case of militarized policing, the results suggest that the often-cited trade-off between public safety and civil liberties is a false choice,” he wrote.

Ryan Welch, now with the University of Tampa, and Jack Mewhirter, at the University of Cincinnati, found in their own 2017 study that “more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police,” even after controlling for other possible factors in police violence, including household income, black population, violent-crime levels and drug use. “When a county goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year,” Welch and Mewhirter wrote.

“We reasoned that if officers become more prone to use violence, we should also see more pets killed by police,” the authors added. “Using the Puppycide Database Project, which tracks police shootings of pets across the United States, we found that in counties where police received more military equipment, law enforcement kills more pets. That finding bolsters our assessment that militarization makes police more likely to turn to violence to solve problems.”

Since Ferguson, local law enforcement agencies have received more than $850 million worth of equipment through the DOD program. “As of this March, the arsenals of local law enforcement agencies currently include 494 mine-resistant vehicles, at least 800 pieces of body armor, more than 6,500 rifles, and at least 76 aircraft acquired through the 1033 program post-Ferguson,” BuzzFeed News reports. “Notably, one of the items Sessions specifically mentioned when Obama’s executive order was rescinded were bayonets. Over the past 14 months, at least 167 of the rifle-mounted weapons have been sent to local law enforcement agencies.” 

Kenneth Lowande from the University of Michigan released a study in February on the impacts of Obama’s post-Ferguson executive order: “Findings suggest similar federal reforms designed to demilitarize local law enforcement would not.”

Speaking at a law enforcement roundtable on Monday, Trump suggested he does not believe systemic changes to policing are necessary. And there is no indication he’s changed his mind about the value of transferring military equipment. “We want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there, and sometimes we’ll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently," Trump said at the White House. “But I say 99.9 – let’s go with 99 – percent of them [are] great, great people, and they’ve done jobs that are record setting.”