As the country focuses on the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, this week, here’s a look at a vehicular example of the rapidly increasing and disturbing trend of police militarization across the United States.
Built by several manufacturers in a dizzying array of variations, the MRAP (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) is a wheeled legacy of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is engineered around armored, V-shaped hulls to survive mine and improvised-explosive-device attacks.
The first owner of Eureka, California’s own Navistar MaxxPro, the Department of Defense (DoD), spent between $500,000 and $700,000 to buy it—one of the thousands of vehicles the Pentagon originally acquired for a reported $40–$50 billion. It’s now one of hundreds of MRAPs flowing to local police agencies. Eureka’s force, as with many police departments around the country, acquired its MRAP gratis under the DoD’s “Excess Property Program,” which donates surplus ground vehicles, aircraft, weapons, and other gear to state and local law-enforcement agencies.
MRAPs, however, are poorly suited to domestic life, according to Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Balko says, “They move slowly, they get terribly expensive to maintain, and they get terrible mileage.” The armor-plated MRAPs, as it turns out, also tend to be tippy. With as much as 20 tons spread between just two axles, the MRAPs are so heavy that they can damage roads and must be barred from some bridges.
For civil libertarians, the major problem with local police operating MRAPs is this: They contribute to an inappropriate military mind-set that has cops thinking they’re at war with the citizenry. Instead of being used in exceedingly rare situations involving barricaded suspects or terrorists, domesticated MRAPs wind up transporting SWAT teams serving warrants—almost encouraging such situations to escalate violently. The Baltimore Sun reports that in one Maryland county in 2009, SWAT teams were sent out an average of more than four times per day, and only six percent of those deployments were for extreme emergency situations.
But many police officers appreciate the protection. “We have no plans to mount a machine gun,” said undersheriff Shawn Lamouree of Warren County, New York, to the Associated Press last year. “The whole idea is to protect the occupants.” They may not need much protection: There were just four murders reported by the Warren County Sheriff between 1997 and 2012, the latest year for which the FBI has data.
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Balko criticizes the Pentagon for not doing a good job tracking the MRAPs or how they’re being used after they leave DoD possession. But there are a lot of MRAPs coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and many are in near-new condition. Eureka’s showed only 4000 miles on its odometer. There are a lot of police departments that want them, and according to the AP, 165 surplus MRAPs were distributed in 2013. There were unfilled requests for 731 more.
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