$34 Billion Spent on Riot Gear, Pepper Spray, and Drones, but Not for the Army.

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Over the last ten years, $34 billion dollars has been spent arming local police. Yep, local police. Not an army invading another country, or defending our soil from hostile invasion. $34 Billion Dollars spent by the guys who make traffic stops, drug busts, investigate homicides, robberies…well you know what they do.  Why are our local police arming themselves for some kind of armageddon? It seems that grants from the Department of Homeland Security are in least part to blame. The Daily Beast  published a report on the spending, which noted that $2 billion in grants were given to local police in 2011, and President Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contributed an additional half-billion dollars.

Here are a few of the examples that  turned up in the report, which was conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting:

  • Fargo, North Dakota, which averages less than 2 homicides per year since 2005, has a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret.   They have spent $8 million arming their officers with, among other things, Kevlar helmets, and military assault rifles.
  • In Augusta, Maine, with a population of fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests.
  •  Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots.
  • An Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.  He also claims to operate his own air armada of private pilots—dubbed Operation Desert Sky.
  • The city of Ogden, Utah, is launching a 54-foot, remote-controlled “crime-fighting blimp” with a powerful surveillance camera.
  • In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly boasted this fall he had a secret capability to shoot down an airliner if one threatened the city again.
Of course, all of this armament is done in the name of public protection.  And it’s not just an increase in spending going on.  Local police are beginning to exhibit para-military behavior in some areas, as training increasingly mimics SWAT and armed conflict training.  Back in 2005 this video was released of a police raid of a rave party in Utah:

And we reported earlier this year about Arizona tactical officers sprayed the home of ex-Marine Jose Guerena with gunfire as he stood in a hallway with a rifle that he did not fire. He was hit 22 times and died.

So do you really feel safer with a heavily armed local police presence?  Are you okay with overspending in the name of security?  Let us know what you think.

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The Editor

The Editor