Yahoo Finance Bipartisan effort to reform program providing U.S. military gear to local police fails in Senate
This story has been updated with the results of the vote.
A bipartisan effort by senators to amend the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to address how law enforcement officials across the country get access to military-grade equipment failed to garner sufficient votes.
The amendment needed 60 votes in the Senate to be adopted and received 51. (A narrower but similar amendment, proposed by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) addressed the transfer of certain equipment, passed by a 90-10 vote.)
The 1033 program was designed to help cash- and resource-strapped police departments get the equipment they need. But years of data reveal that many were shipped a lot more military gear than they actually needed.
And the country has recently seen a rise in calls to demilitarize and reduce funding for police, which has strengthened calls to amend the 1033 program.
“Weapons of war should not be transferred to local police departments,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), one of the co-sponsors of the amendment, told Yahoo Finance. “There's an alarming trend over the last decade or so to arm local police as though they are about to storm a city in a war zone, and that makes no one safer.”
Schatz added that “given the failure of the Republicans to take up meaningful policing reform, this is an exception because it has bipartisan support.” Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Rand Paul (R-KY) are also co-sponsors.
Paul, who previously worked with Schatz to introduce similar legislation in 2015, noted that the proposed amendment would ensure that the Department of Defense is not transferring weapons such as grenade launchers and weaponized drones “meant for war overseas to local police” and urged the Senate to pass this “long-overdue reform.”
Our police don’t need weapons of war. For the first time, we have a bipartisan majority to reform the “1033” program. Thanks to @lisamurkowski @KamalaHarris and @RandPaul for co-authoring, and thanks to organizations and people on the right, left and center who work on this.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) July 21, 2020
The amendment aimed to prohibit transfers of some “offensive equipment” used by the military in addition to overhauling oversight of record-keeping of the program by the Defense Logistics Agency.
“Our legislation has a quarterly reporting requirement to ensure that none of these transfers end up causing rather than preventing mayhem,” Schatz explained, “and there has been very little accountability in this program and that's something that there's a bipartisan appetite to fix.”
‘There's a recognition on the right and the left’
The 1033 program had been amended before.
in 2014, after militarized police in Ferguson, Mo., faced off against civilians protesting the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order to improve oversight over this program and prohibited the transfer of items like bayonets, tracked armored vehicles, and grenade launchers.
The Trump administration reversed that order in 2017 and fully restored the program.
Calls to dismantle the program are growing louder amid protests over police brutality against Black Americans after George Floyd was killed by a law enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Some soldiers responding to resulting civil unrest in Washington, D.C., were issued bayonets upon being mobilized in the nation’s capital.
“There's a recognition on the right and the left that it is in no one's best interest to arm our police departments with armor piercing bullets, armed drones, and tanks,” Schatz said.
The calls for demilitarization of law enforcement is likely to grow even stronger as the Trump administration sends federal officers into cities like Portland, Ore., to quell mostly peaceful protests against police brutality.
“What's happening in Portland is authoritarian behavior,” Schatz said, adding that “this is police power being abused for the sake of politics, and this is the kind of thing that United States senators fly around the world to scold other countries and tell them to cut it out. But it's our president and it's our Department of Homeland Security — that is behaving like we're on the edge of totalitarianism.”
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Aarthi is a reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.
Read more:
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