Rethinking the 1033 Program
Amidst civil unrest, calls for defunding the police have become a rallying cry for activists who recognize the bloated budgets of municipal police departments and their efficacy in keeping communities — particularly communities of color — safe are not directly proportional. The violence and suffering visited upon Black people, in particular, by discriminatory and racist law enforcement practices has become a centerpiece of the conversation around how we think about and approach public safety.
The language — defund the police — is deliberately incendiary, designed to incite anger and defensiveness. We back up from there, forcing would-be opponents to defend systemic racism and the indiscriminate protection of police officers and law enforcement agencies who’ve behaved unforgivably and in ways that should also be — but too often aren’t — technically unlawful. There are pieces of this discussion we can all (mostly) agree on: that our most vulnerable communities deserve support for schools and libraries; that all human beings deserve respect; and that the United States Department of Defense should not be recouping its losses for over-ordering tanks and assault-style weapons by passing them on to municipal law enforcement agencies.
The 1033 program, which began in 1997, gives the Defense Department license to order weaponry from private contractors and then provide those same weapons to municipal police departments at no cost.
This is taxpayer dollars into the Defense budget, which then goes toward lining the pockets of private arms contractors…and we maybe didn’t need all those tanks to start with? To be clear, the 1033 program is known partly for its nefarious intent and partly for its notoriously poor management, so the actual number of tanks remains unknown.
Our municipal police departments are being fleeced by the DOD. There is an oversupply of military weapons and the federal government has created a demand by permitting — and in many cases encouraging and incentivizing — our civilian police forces to become paramilitary forces. The militarization of civilian police forces endangers communities and facilitates the use of excessive force and intimidation tactics. The ultimate beneficiaries of this program are not the communities that the police vow to protect and serve, but the private defense contractors whose existence depends on the continual sale of firearms, tanks, and other weaponry, and on whose behalf the federal government was agitating when the 1033 program began.
The 1033 program is a nasty representative of the everyday impact the so-called “military industrial complex” has on the lives of everyday people in everyday towns.
And that’s the kind of program I’d be eager to defund.
