All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Okay, you guys, introducing Wayne McElrath.
He is a senior investigative advisor to the Project on Government Oversight, and he led the Government Accountability Office's investigation into the Pentagon's 1033 program, which provides equipment to police departments.
And he's written this thing with our friend Mandy Smithberger over there at POGO as well.
She's the Director of the Center for Defense Information there, a great activist on the question of military spending.
And they have written this piece together for the USA Today here, Ending Police Violence begins with Cutting Pentagon Money Militarization Program.
Welcome to the show, Wayne.
How are you doing, sir?
Good morning, and thanks for having me on the show, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
So, as I said, Mandy is a friend of the show.
And so I just reached out to her because that was easier.
And she said, oh, no, you got to talk to Wayne.
He wrote the thing.
And now, as I just read out loud in your bio thing, you did the investigation for the Government Accountability Office of the 1033 program.
And for people not familiar, that used to be the Government Accounting Office.
And it's basically an auditing organization that belongs to Congress for use against the executive branch.
So actually, sometimes does good work there, because there's a little bit of a division of power kind of thing going on there.
And so I'm really excited to find out that, because that means then that I presume that you had access to all kinds of information that even the very best journalists and NGO types could have never got their hands on about how all of this works.
So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to hear everything that you know and think about the question of the militarization of police in America, sir, please go ahead.
Well, I think because there's been such a surplus of military items available to police departments now, through the 1033 program, and also the overspending that occurs in military budgets, that now supplies driving the demand by our local police departments to start up what's known as SWAT or Special Weapons and Tactics teams all over the nation, because they're getting basically free equipment to be able to try this concept out in their police department, that may or may not be antithetical to what the actual community needs.
And through our work on the 1033 program, we actually started a fictitious police department at the federal level.
And we submitted justifications for equipment that were totally fictitious, and were able to receive military grade items for this police department.
Now, just imagine you have a police chief or a law enforcement organization where they decide, well, you know what, we're going to take this on, they're not getting community involvement, the justification, they could totally fabricate or make up a reason and send that into the DOD or DLA 1033 program through their state coordinator and receive these items that, in my opinion, have an intimidating factor on the exercise of free rights when used in certain circumstances.
It's not to say that there's no reason for police departments to have certain equipment for hostage situations and high intensity warrants and issues like that.
But overall, we've noticed that this type of equipment is being utilized relative to demonstration.
And even with certain military branches, they're not using MRAPs because of the negative effect that it has on counterinsurgency.
Right.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So I mean, stick with that right there.
There are no roadside bombs being set off, no IEDs or EFPs being used against any cops anywhere in America ever, I think, probably.
I don't know.
Maybe it happened one time somewhere back in the 1930s during probation.
Maybe.
Yeah, I don't know.
But yeah, there's clearly no need for a mine resistant armored vehicle.
And then as you say, it accomplishes nothing more than separating law enforcement, these troops basically, from the people that they're supposedly the security force of rather than the lords over.
And so, but yeah, so there's a couple major things there.
I mean, I guess the main part of it is that it sounds like you're saying, and not that I'm disagreeing, but just to clarify, that the way you put it with supply leading demand here, that essentially the corporate welfarist aspect of this is leading and the changing of the relationship, you know, in significant degrees between the police and the people from security force to occupying army over the citizens and all this is really just sort of an unintended side effect as more than it is a deliberate plan to reduce us under absolute despotism.
They're just cashing checks and not, you know, without having to get real jobs, which is what everybody really wants in life, right?
And they're dumping, the Defense Department is dumping all of this equipment into communities and it is fully having an impact on the psyche of police officers as well as communities that they serve.
In my opinion, we don't want the American society to be habituated to seeing these types of equipment and law enforcement officers draped in helmets and military type gear roaming our streets.
That is not anything that I would like the American public to be comfortable with at all.
Now so there's correlations and causations and things like that going on here too, right?
Where they say that, look, crime rates are down.
Well, we say crime rates are down, so why do you have to go walking around like, you know, paramilitary troops all the time and this kind of thing?
They go, well, it's because law enforcement has done such a great job of cracking down is why crime rates are down.
So you wouldn't want to fix something that's not broken, would you?
No one can make that correlation to say that, you know, police departments have been doing such a great job that crime rates are down.
There's any number of reasons and factors, crime being multifaceted as it is, that it could be because of better job opportunities for communities, better health.
There could be any number of reasons that crime rates have dramatically dropped as opposed to the police.
The police are just one factor in one of many that contribute to lower crime rates.
Well, yeah.
And I was just joshing, of course, but, you know, playing devil's advocate as I like to do for the devil.
He needs an advocate sometimes.
But so I guess I'm interested in kind of the scope of all of this, like so 1033.
I know there's a Homeland Security program that does virtually the same thing.
And there's the 1033 is the one that you specialize in here.
But when exactly did this start and how many armored personnel carriers are we talking about here?
How many AR-15s, MP5 machine guns, whatever paramilitary, I don't know, boots or whatever it is that, you know, can really help us to understand what a change has taken place over what period of time here?
Right.
The conceptualization for the 1033 program actually started with an NDAA back in the 1990s and actually went into effect in 1997.
That program being turned over to the Defense Logistics Agency so they can actually distribute these items to needy police departments.
Originally, it was designed for counter counterterrorism and also counter narcotics investigation.
And over time, this program, I think to date, it's received and you have to look at the dollars with kind of a John DeSade because they they use the actual cost of the items at the original time of purchase.
That this program has received approximately $7 billion.
Now, you have two types of equipment.
You have controlled items and you have non-controlled items.
Non-controlled items are items such as medical equipment, tents, typewriters, computers, and the like.
And then you have controlled items.
Now, the 1033 program states that the vast majority of equipment that's going out the door is non-controlled items, those items that are don't have a real militaristic footprint.
And then the rest of the items are the controlled items that we are more concerned about.
I can't give you an actual figure on the number of machine guns, grenade launchers, bayonets to a certain extent that are out there.
Now, being a career law enforcement officer, I've worked for a variety of law enforcement inspector general's organization.
I have never seen a reason to have a bayonet.
And then I'm also I joined the United States Marine Corps Reserves when I was in college.
I can't see any practical application for bayonets.
But those items were actually at the inception of this program, something that police departments were getting in large numbers.
And then they were restricted by the Obama administration.
Now, with the Trump administration, even bayonets are back on the list of items that police departments can get.
And the justification, according to the DLA, is that, you know what, police officers can use this to cut seatbelts.
There are plenty of items short of a bayonet that they could use to cut seatbelts in emergency situations.
And I'm sorry, I don't think that there's a large number of seatbelts out there that police officers are cutting on a regular basis to save motorists.
So it seems like, as I stated before, that because there is a supply of this equipment at no cost, it is driving the demand by our police department that is changing the psyche within the police departments to this more of a warrior ethos as opposed to being one of protecting and serving and being guardian.
Right.
And that's what's funny about it, right, is there probably hasn't been a single department where they thought, OK, under these circumstances, we're going to break out the bayonets and start stabbing people with them.
It's just they're cutting a check to the bayonet manufacturers is all that's going on here.
The military has a giant box full and they want to get rid of them so they can buy some more.
Right.
And I think that's a reasonable leap to make.
I can't say that based on data statistics.
And I wish a lot of these programs or justifications for receiving these items would be based on good data.
And that's something that working for the Government Accountability Office that I have a fond appreciation of the fact that a lot of our work was based upon data and the evidence being sufficient and appropriate to be able to make recommendations, which a lot of police departments and the DLA aren't doing.
It's just like, well, they said they needed it.
We don't know if there's been community involvement in those particular decisions or whether it's not just based upon any type of reasonable justification.
For our fake police department, there was nothing behind it.
The justification we just made up out of thin air.
We submitted it and we got approved.
Yeah.
So let's say we were a police department for a real community and that community had no input.
And then they had protests and we came rolling up in MRAPs with our bayonets and our M16s and our grenade launchers.
They would be surprised that their police department, the one that they paid through tax dollars, had this type of equipment in their inventory.
Yeah.
And we're surprised the Taliban have American night vision goggles over there.
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And now, so here's the thing, too, is I remember back in the 90s when basically all the cops started dressing like SWAT guys, you know, much of the time, even if they don't have all the full gear on, they're wearing the black fatigues, you know, more like a Gestapo type uniform than a deputy sheriff's sort of brown button up blouse from the past and or blue for a city police officer or something like that was that was how it was when I was younger.
But when it first started out that these guys, especially in Austin, have you ever been to Austin?
But our crime rate is essentially nothing.
I mean, there's there are tough parts of Dallas and Houston.
There are not tough parts of Austin.
I mean, this is the Shire here.
There's nothing for them to fight.
And it was silly.
And people laughed at them like, what are you guys doing?
They reminded me of when I was in elementary school, me and my friends, we all played guns in the woods.
That was the thing that we played as boys was, you know, dress up as as soldiers or Red Dawn or whatever, shooting each other's gun.
And then to see these guys, it was like that.
I was like, dude, you guys are full grown men.
And you remind me of me in fourth grade playing like you're in a war, but you're not.
You're on patrol in Austin, Texas, of all places, you know, just.
But it stopped being silly.
And I think they even knew it was silly.
I think they thought like, wow, I sure am wearing a lot of junk, you know, for no reason.
It seems silly to them, too.
I think it was inescapable.
But now it's not.
Now it's just, yeah, this is what cops look like.
They dress up like basically SWAT team night Raiders, you know, SEAL Team 95 or whatever all day long, every day.
And then they can't help it.
Instead of seeing themselves as the goofballs, they rationalize it and justify it.
The people of Austin, Texas, are enemy combatants trying to kill them.
And so no wonder they kill so many of us all the time.
Because if you look at the list of most dangerous jobs, police don't even make the top ten.
Right.
Yeah, people might be surprised to hear that, but that's the truth.
Yeah, exactly.
Police don't even make the top ten.
It's one of those, you know, because of certain police departments effort, not been to your first city of Austin any number of times, and I've thoroughly enjoyed myself while I was there.
I'm over time with anything.
We've heard certain ideas that have been put forth so often said now they've become part of what we believe to be true, but they haven't been.
And I think this is another one of those, you know, the cart is leading the horse.
They kept doing it, and after a while, we kind of didn't think about it.
Now, when we're sitting here saying, yeah, we have a right to protest, we're exercising our First Amendment rights, and we're walking down the street in a nonviolent fashion to have our police department that should be assisting and protecting the exercise of free rights is now standing there looking at the community as your insurgent.
And our president using terms like if you don't control the battle space.
Right.
American streets aren't battle space.
Which, of course, he's just parroting his national security cabinet that talked about the situation in those terms to him.
Exactly.
He doesn't know what that word means.
He just learned that earlier today or the day he used it.
But yeah, yeah, absolutely right.
And as you say, during completely peaceful protests, you have paramilitary cops come out in full force against them.
And then in other places where there are serious riots going on, the cops are, again, attacking the protesters, not the rioters, not the looters, but the people who are the low-hanging fruit, essentially, and easy to pick on.
Because at the end of the day, they're all a bunch of cowards.
The fact that we're having this conversation now and there's community involvement and there's media attention being drawn to it, at least we could cut off one aspect of this particular problem.
As we stated before, it's multifaceted.
Right.
And that the 1033 program is just one piece of a larger puzzle.
Now that let's say if we shut down the 1033 program and police departments were no longer able to get these free of charge, the DLA, the DOD, through this program has created an appetite.
There's an appetite for this type of equipment.
And the military industrial complex will now have another market that they can go after.
Let's go after police departments.
They want helmets.
They want bulletproof vests.
They want M-16s.
They want mine-resistant vehicles because of all the mines that are littered throughout our community and streets.
It's amazing.
Yep.
Definitely, I like what you say about it's all just the cart before the horse and all that, tail wagging the dog.
And it's the same thing with the economics of the wars.
You know, I just had this exact same discussion with Ted Carpenter about NATO expansion in Eastern Europe.
It's the same exact set.
The economics of regulatory capture and rent-seeking and, you know, what they call quasi-free market capitalism, you know, contracting and, you know, welfarism by giant powerful corporations at the expense of everybody else.
And to the degree that they dictate the policy and change our society in ways that we would have never agreed to just through, you know, their kind of special interest politicking all the time.
And but, you know, here's the thing about it, too, is the bottom line of all of this comes down to drug prohibition and never even mind pot.
Until this society completely legalizes the possession and trade in heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines and all the prescription pills and whatever else, too, then this is going to keep happening because that's the justification for all of these, all the militarization is so that they can do their SEAL team SWAT raids, their night raids at people's homes at, you know, 3 a.m. and terrorize them and kill them looking for contraband.
And you can't have a free society and you can't have a civilian, a truly civilian police department when you allow some adults to outlaw other adults from possessing substances that they wish to possess or trade with other willing grown human beings for substances that they wish to possess.
That has got to go.
And as long as that's here, as long as people are afraid to say, yeah, legalize heroin, are you crazy for keeping it illegal all this time?
Then it's going to continue on like this, because if you want to have a war on heroin in your town, you're going to need a SWAT team, right?
Well, I can't speak to the drug policy.
I was a narcotics agent with the predecessor to the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Customs Service along the southwest border, where we conducted a lot of counter narcotics raids.
And we did not use that level of equipment unless the individuals were highly dangerous.
And that was far and few between.
Very infrequently did we break out that type of equipment.
Relative to that type of contraband, that's one of those moral issues that society will continue to grapple with, much akin to what we grappled with between 1920 and 1933, when prohibition was enforced in the United States.
No matter what it is, I think that hopefully over time, we'll arrive at a point where we will figure out the best way to deal with these things.
But it seems like a leader, you know, a lost leader in this is the police department that are being utilized to over police certain communities.
And that's where a lot of our interest is coming from.
The fact that not only are you using this in a way that it was not intended for counter narcotics and counter terrorism, but you're using it in black and brown communities more frequently.
And those police departments who have this type of equipment seem to be, like I said, this is not backed by any type of data that I can point to at this particular moment, seem to be more prone to use or escalate to a level of deadly violence, which is of concern to me.
So the social aspect of the more libertarian view of people should be able to be themselves.
And there's an over policing.
I believe that there's an over policing.
I can't speak to the actual root causes of all of it.
But this is just one of many threads that needs to be pulled out and examined.
Yeah.
Well, I think you guys really nail it in this article.
And I'm surprised, actually, how stark this language is for the USA Today.
I'm impressed that they publish this in this way where you talk about how people really feel like they're being occupied.
The cops are their enemy.
The cops feel like the people are their enemy.
And it's the policy that's made it this way.
It doesn't have to be this way.
And, you know, I'm as anti-government as can be.
But I could see how we could be much better than we are now.
And, you know, there was a story.
I'm 90 percent sure it was here in Texas, say, four or five years ago.
It must have just been in one county, I guess, where the sheriff decided that all of his deputies were to wear white blouses with clip on ties.
They were going back to the old days and no more of these paramilitary, you know, parachute pants and all of the cargo pants and all this stuff.
You're going to wear slacks and you're going to wear white blouses and you're going to start calling everybody sir and ma'am and express a little humility out there because your job is public safety and you're the peace force and not the occupying army.
And that's how it's going to be around here.
And the thing is, I mean, if would they argue that dressing cops up like soldiers doesn't affect their mindset and and if they would admit that it does, they'd probably have to admit that that's a negative.
But if they're going to deny it, then how about we put all the cops in blouses and clip on ties and see how they like that if it doesn't make any difference.
But what if it makes a difference in the minds of the people, say, for example, pulled over on the side of the road, whether the guy who pulls you over looks like he's from the Delta Force or whether he's, you know, works for Andy Griffith.
Right.
So why not just show up in court in jeans and a T-shirt or jeans and a white beater?
Because we know that the way that people dress makes a difference in the way that you're treated and the way that you project yourself into the world.
So we recognize doctors because they work a certain uniform.
We recognize nurses because they wear a certain uniform.
We recognize lawyers because they wear a certain uniform.
The thing is, is that if a uniform changes, it does have a mind, a impact on the mindset and the way that you deal with people and the way that you're welcomed by those people.
If you project yourself as being a soldier, occupy as an occupier, then people will cheat will treat you in a free society that you are, you know, you're an occupying force.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm so sorry that we're all out of time here because I have a lot more questions and this is such an important subject here.
But I do hope that people will go and look at this great piece at the USA Today.
It's called Ending Police Violence Begins with Cutting Pentagon Money, Militarization Program.
And Wayne, is the actual report that you did for the Congressional Accountability Office, is that available online somewhere?
Yes, it is.
It's actually at GAO.gov.
And there's actually two reports out there.
There's a 2017 report on the 1033 program and there's a 2006 report.
And all of this information is free of charge, is located on the GAO website.
And I welcome you or our listeners to go out there and take a look at that report and actually the work that we did and some of the recommendations that were made for local police departments.
Great.
I'll definitely take a look at that even after this interview, because I sure want to know.
Thank you again so much for your time, Wayne.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
That's Wayne McElrath and he is Senior Investigative Advisor to POGO.
That's the Project on Government Oversight.
And again, he led the Government Accountability Office's investigation into the Pentagon's 1033 program.and LibertarianInstitute.org
