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Police killings more likely in agencies that get military gear, data shows

Hardware designed for war exerts subtle pressure on police culture, experts say.

Americans have seen it time and again in recent months on the nightly news: Protesters in the streets confronted by local police officers carrying assault rifles, some atop armored vehicles, looking more like soldiers than public servants.

Much of that equipment has trickled down to police departments from a controversial Defense Department initiative known as the 1033 program, a 30-year-old federal initiative that provides a way for the military to dispose of surplus equipment by sending it to local police.

The impact on policing has been huge. In Georgia alone, police departments and sheriff’s offices have received more than 2,700 military rifles, night vision goggles and laser gun sights, and literally hundreds of armored vehicles, including more than two dozen mine-resistant vehicles built to fight the war on terror abroad.

To get the military equipment, police departments pay only for the shipping costs. But that does not mean the program comes without other costs.

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Trump appears to threaten aliens with ‘military the likes of which we’ve never had before’

Donald Trump did not deny media reporting that the US Department of Defense has set up a task force to examine “unidentified alien phenomena” after the Air Force released a video earlier this year showing pilots flying by what many people have speculated was a UFO.

“Can you explain why the Department of Defense has set up a UFO task force?” Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Mr Trump in an interview on Sunday.

“Are there UFOs?” she asked.

“Well, I’m going to have to check on that. I mean, I’ve heard that. I heard that two days ago. So I’ll check on that. I’ll take a good, strong look at that,” Mr Trump said.

He then quickly segued into a boast about US military might, which some people on Twitter took to be the president threatening aliens with human weaponry.

“I will tell you this, we now have created a military the likes of which we’ve never had before, in terms of equipment. The equipment that we have, the weapons that we have, and hopefully — hope to god we never have to use them,” Mr Trump said.

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Why Can’t They Both Lose?

They say if you don’t vote you can’t complain. They’re wrong. Complaining is prior to voting. It is deeper and more powerful than voting. It is the original act of politics. Before there was democracy, there was sitting around the campfire complaining about the way the headman allocated the shares of mastodon meat. Bellyaching about the boss is more than a political right. It is a human right.

And so, in Reason‘s 2020 election issue, we are here to complain. The candidates from the major parties are subpar. They display troubling authoritarian tendencies. Their records in office—one long, one short—are underwhelming and frequently self-contradictory. Their actions consistently fail to match their rhetoric. If they agree on one thing, it is that they have the right, and perhaps even the obligation, to tell you what to do in the bedroom and in the boardroom, in the streets and in the sheets. If they agree on a second thing, it is the necessity of spending ever-larger sums of taxed and borrowed money in pursuit of ever-vaguer goals. They helm parties that are similarly compromised and hypocritical.

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