In the Washington Post, Radley Balko looks at some documentation recently acquired by Mother Jones showing how police departments explain why they need war-fighting tools for police work:
Mother Jones got ahold of some of the forms police agencies fill out when requesting military gear from the Pentagon. They’re pretty revealing.
… the single most common reason agencies requested a mine-resistant vehicle was to combat drugs. Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement. Almost half of all departments indicated that they sit within a region designated by the federal government as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. (Nationwide, only 17 percent of counties are HIDTAs.) One out of six departments were prepared to use the vehicles to serve search or arrest warrants on individuals who had yet to be convicted of a crime. And more than half of the departments indicated they were willing to deploy armored vehicles in a broad range of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids.
Police officials frequently say they need these behemoth vehicles to protect officers from active shooters. But that isn’t what they’re telling the Pentagon when they request them.
By contrast, out of the total 465 requests, only 8 percent mention the possibility of a barricaded gunman. For hostage situations, the number is 7 percent, for active shooters, 6 percent. Only a handful mentioned downed officers or the possibility of terrorism.
“This is a great example of how police as an institution talk to each other privately, versus how they talk to the public and journalists who might raise questions about what they’re doing with this equipment,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied police militarization for decades. When police are pressured in public, Kraska says, “They’re going to say, ‘How about Columbine?’ or point to all these extremely rare circumstances.”
Kraska is correct to call such situations extremely rare. Despite the saturation coverage mass shootings get, statistically, the odds of one occurring in your immediate community are still incredibly low. I suspect one big reason the public hasn’t been more outspoken in opposing the transfer of this sort of gear is because most people think such shootings are more common than they are. That’s mostly because the media have been good at scaring people into thinking as much. (Ironically, one of the media outlets most guilty of overstating the frequency of such events … is Mother Jones.)
