A Blueprint of Local Police Militarization in the USA

USA

By Graydon Carter
militarization, policing, police, military, tactical gear, 1033 program, 1033

This project visualizes tactical allocations to local law enforcement agencies (from 1995 to 2015) through the 1033 Program.

Since 1995, the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has allocated excess equipment from the Department of Defense (DoD) to law enforcement agencies across the country. Hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of gear has been distributed via this program, put in the hands of police officers, sheriffs and other local security personnel.

The database which recorded these transfers was made public in the wake of the Ferguson protests of 2015. The heavily-militarized police response to the social movements in St. Louis made headlines across the country, prompting citizens to ask questions regarding the tactical equipment used. The backlash which followed prompted the militarization transparency initiative at The Marshall Project that inspired this project.

Although the allocation data was made available in 2015, the DLA released a ‘dirty’ spreadsheet, filled with an enormous amount of non-tactical disbursements which had also been approved via the 1033 Program.

This project “cleans” the DLA data using a definition of “tactical” derived from the Marshall Project before specifically geocoding & visualizing allocations to “local” law enforcement (at the county or municipal level) by 2015. Gear allocated to agencies higher than the county-level has been excluded in order to accurately map “local” militarization nationwide.

In order to make this data more accessible to average Americans, this project provides two primary filtering tools- regional drop-down boxes and a singular search bar. This allows individuals to investigate and compare states and regions they are especially interested in. Click-based popups (at the county-level) have been incorporated to allow users to view militarization totals in 2006, 2009, 2012 & 2015. Below are three images which illustrate these features:

Finally, this project averaged county-level allocations in each of the 4 regions (West, South, Midwest, Northeast) and discovered that the Western region has received nearly twice the amount of tactical gear (in USD) than the next closest, the Northeast. Allocation totals to the South and Midwest pale in comparison. This data is available to users via the sidebar.