How "militarized" is your local PD?

[MtyMous]

IamA Active Duty military as well. I agree that it's a bit unsettling that this gear is down the street to be used domestically.

On the other hand, my work does directly deal with acquisition of these types of things, and I can tell you that this is a definitely better than some of the alternatives that were posed. thousands of MRAP's were to be "Mothballed" by abandoning in place. Yeah. That's right... they were ALL going to be field stripped and left to rot over there.

This is also an intrinsic issue with the type of acquisition that was performed to get them in the first place. Our guys on the ground needed something mine and IED resistant and they needed it yesterday. We entered into a rapid acquisition which I'll spare you all the details of, but what it does is assume a lot of risk and it has left us with a surplus that we can't use overseas with this fantastic "draw down" that we have going on. They were supposed to be used in theater and then eventually tapered off through the use of foreign military sales and sold to our allies. But when you end things so abruptly, you can't do that anymore.

So what do we do? Field strip them and leave them over there to be used against us? Or do we bring them home and auction them off to the local police forces? Neither one is ideal IMO, but which pile of shit stinks less?

[Rorik]

LA County SCHOOL District Police....

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/...-police-force/

[Snip's]

^^^ School kids really are destructive with Bluebird buses.... This might work, but needs to be in yellow...

[professor]

Originally Posted by Porthos

Being military myself it does bother me that the local PD has this much gear. Mostly because I joined to defend the Constitution not to defend a police state

Same boat.

[maxmini]

The Los Angeles SCHOOL DISTRICT police dept. returned the three grenade launchers but kept the M16's and the mine resistant truck

[LowCountry S]

Originally Posted by professor

Same boat.