Chris0nllyn
Well-Known Member
President Trump signed an executive order expanding a controversial U.S. Defense Department program that transfers military equipment—including armored vehicles, aircraft and firearms—to civilian law enforcement agencies.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the expansion of the "1033 program" at a National Fraternal Order of Police event in Nashville on Aug. 28.
"The executive order the president will sign today will ensure that you can get the lifesaving gear that you need to do your job and send a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become the new normal," Sessions said.
In the final year before Obama's 2015 reforms, 1033 distributed nearly a billion dollars worth of equipment among the more than 8,000 law-enforcement and other agencies that have enrolled in the program.
In a July 2017 report, the Government Accountability Office, the feds' main watchdog agency, warned that the Defense Department "lacks reasonable assurance that it has the ability to prevent, detect and respond to potential fraud and minimize associated security risks" associated with 1033.
GAO researchers posed as representatives of a fake federal law enforcement agency and acquired, via 1033, more than a million dollars worth of ex-military weapons including rifles, bomb components and night vision goggles. "It was like getting stuff off of eBay," one researcher said.
Leon Lott, the long-serving sheriff in Richland County, knows this all too well. In 2005, Lott acquired a former U.S. Army M-113 armored personnel carrier, ostensibly for his department's SWAT team. The M-113 has tracks like a tank does and armor capable of deflecting smaller calibers of gunfire.
But in fact, the Richland County Sheriff's department never actually deployed the vehicle for its intended purpose.
In 2013, the Richland County Sheriff's Department received two, twin-prop C-23 transport planes that the Army had recently retired.
Richland County, one of the most developed and urban counties in South Carolina, already operated ex-military helicopters and had no obvious need for transport planes. A few months after receiving the C-23s, Lott's department arranged to trade them to Win Win Aviation in Illinois. In exchange for the C-23s, Win Win offered to give Lott a new Cessna plane sporting high-tech surveillance gear worth half a million dollars.
But shortly before the suspension, Lott managed to get at least one last major piece of equipment via the 1033 program—a 20-ton Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/one-so...-the-insanity-of-giving-military-gear-to-cops