Federal Militarization of Law Enforcement Must End
The federal government arms local police forces in the United States with weapons of war. A program called “1033,” for the section of the act that created it, allows the Department of Defense to give state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies military hardware. Since its inception in 1996, nearly 10,000 jurisdictions have received more than $7 billion of equipment. This includes combat vehicles, rifles, military helmets, and misleadingly named “non-” or less-lethal weapons, some of which have featured in police raids and police violence against protesters, including recent protests for racial justice.
The ACLU helped place police militarization in the broader landscape of police violence with our 2014 groundbreaking report, “War Comes Home.” That report released just months before police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri highlighted the ways that militarized police act aggressively and violently, ta