Dom Giordano: Military Equipment For Police Departments
By Dom Giordano
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- With the funeral of Michael Brown, we have finished act one of the drama in Ferguson, Missouri. Of course fueled by MSNBC and even more by some on CNN the narrative has been almost exclusively about race. My biggest takeaway however involves the fact that the military equipment displayed by the Ferguson police has really focused people on how under the federal 1033 program local police departments have been given billions of military armament.
In fact this overkill of arming local police departments has been extended to college police departments. Politico reported that 100 college police departments have armed themselves. They report that Ohio State University has acquired a mine sweeping device used in combat. Florida State University has acquired a new Humvee. Why do these colleges need this stuff?
These local police and college police departments do not need them and they are troubling because they are not well trained to use them and they distort what I believe is the mission of local police. I'm glad to see that Rand Paul has been in the forefront of opposing all this and building a coalition of people going forward to curtail this program.
Americans are right to be concerned about all this and to be further concerned about every federal government agency arming themselves with their own police forces.Why would the Department of Education need to be purchasing dozens of shotguns? Are these agencies arming themselves because of fear of the American people?
The latest development on this today is that the Cato Institute and others are reporting that substantial amounts of equipment that local departments got from the feds is missing or unaccounted for. I promise to stay on this story and you people opposing it.
