437
As US troops left Iraq, their combat gear went to police
(lemmy.world)
The troop withdrawal created a ton of surplus armament. Through the so-called “1033 program,” police departments can acquire excess military gear from the Pentagon for free.
Source: https://www.stephensemler.com/p/how-the-iraq-war-turbocharged-police
Gotta be careful not to link correlation with causation here. Could just be that vendors started selling to cops a lot more in the 2010s for different reasons.
no... this is literally what happened. the us military has been giving local police assloads of hardware for decades, and thats why you have cops running over dogs with APCs
Maybe, but this plot doesn’t show that.
am I losing it? the picture says the name of the federal program