As the protests that broke out against mass killings in Gaza last year were met with brutal police repression, our team at Women for Weapons Trade Transparency took notice. Our work—which focuses on open records requests and investigative journalism of the police, military, and weapons industry—once again began to take on a deeply personal tone, as we saw the use of military equipment against peaceful protesters at our alma maters.
In April 2024, heavily armed police tackled and arrested peaceful demonstrators at the University of Texas at Austin. In June 2024, snipers were spotted on rooftops overlooking protests at Ohio State University and Indiana University.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and earlier in 2014, communities watched in horror as police deployed military gear during the protests against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri.
At the heart of this problem is a thirty-year-old federal initiative known as the 1122 Program, which allows law enforcement agencies to purchase discounted military-style equipment. These discounts encourage police departments to purchase equipment from Department of Defense contractors, propping up companies that profit from wars abroad and police militarization at home.
Militarization at home and abroad are inherently connected. The bloated Pentagon budget results in equipment being offloaded to domestic law enforcement. As a result, city streets become battlefields, with SWAT teams and armored vehicles corralling crowds and brutalizing citizens.
In the last several years, local police budgets have been the object of resident criticism and scrutiny. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, residents flocked to their city halls to demand police budget cuts and to question the police use of weapons at protests.
Locals have continued to voice their opposition to inflated police budgets and the acquisition of military-style equipment. In Texas and Missouri, residents criticized police departments for their acquisition of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, or MRAPs. Cities including Providence, Rhode Island, Alexandria, Virginia, Bloomington, Indiana, and Brunswick, Maine, have each spent hundreds of thousands to outfit their police departments with Lenco BearCat armored vehicles. And, if the waste of tax dollars to enable protest suppression wasn’t enough, these vehicles—designed for war zones, driven in small towns—have killed residents in car crashes.
Universities across the country, including the University of Texas-Austin, are facing lawsuits for allegedly infringing on students’ First Amendment rights while suppressing pro-Palestine protests. In May 2024, student protestors at UCLA were injured and hospitalized by police, the same police that failed to protect, deescalate, or intervene as students were beaten by a pro-Israel mob. The University of California system has since purchased more drones, ammunition, rifles, and projectile launchers using university money.
Universities deploying militarized police against their own students have not only put America’s youth in harm’s way, they have arrested and jailed the idea that universities exist to serve their students. Armored vehicles used by police across the country pose safety risks to all.
The 1122 Program demonstrates the opacity of the military industrial complex that allows law enforcement agencies to acquire military-style equipment. The nature and intended use of this equipment often contribute to heightened violence, with little accountability for its impact. Greater transparency and mitigation of the intensifying powers of our increasingly militarized police forces is needed.
Militarization at home and abroad is an existential threat. As billions of dollars are funneled into police and military funding, we face the grim reality of a hyper-militarized society where dissent is met with force rather than dialogue.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service. This publication was made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.