By Matt Agorist
There is no question that police in the land of the free have become the standing army that the founders warned us about. Armed to the teeth with tactical gear fit for the battlefield in Afghanistan, American cops are prepared for war domestically. In fact, they are over prepared, and they have so much military gear that they are now sending their surplus to be used in Ukraine to battle the Russians.
“Many of our Department of Defense (DOD) and State Department contacts have asked the law enforcement community for equipment to help the Ukrainian people push back against this violence and protect their citizens,” Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman said on Twitter — noting that his department is sending hundreds of ballistics helmets to Ukraine.
A Message from Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt A. Hoffman. pic.twitter.com/JcY9QHqGOg
— SarasotaSheriff (@SarasotaSheriff) March 3, 2022
Hoffman is one of many sheriffs and law enforcement personnel sending their equipment to Ukraine to be used in war against Russia.
As VICE News reports, the Colorado Department of Public Safety said it was donating more than 80 sets of body armor and 750 helmets, and that it was accepting donations from other law enforcement agencies in the state.
“This is equipment that we are no longer able to use because it is beyond life cycle, or in some cases it may have been replaced or upgraded by some equipment that maybe better fits our needs or is safer,” Colorado DPS spokesperson Patricia Billinger told local station KARE9.
In true American political fashion, however, this move is not free from corrupt practices.
Though much of this equipment is at the end of its life cycle, Hoffman said that the Pentagon is attempting to “supply more than 50,000 helmets and law enforcement supplies in the coming weeks” from a weapons manufacturer in his town — a claim the Pentagon denies.
According to VICE News, the State Department “has made no such request.” A Pentagon spokesperson told VICE News in an email Thursday: “We are aware of no such requests from the Department of Defense.”
However, the defense contractor in Sarasota says it has inside information and “all communication has been verbal through a third-party vendor that has been vetted by DOD.” As Vice reports:
That vendor is a Sarasota-based Global Ordnance, a defense contractor and commercial arms and equipment distributor, whose sales reached nearly $200 million in 2020. Along with its subsidiary Global Military Products (GMP), the company has won at least a half-billion dollars in Defense Department contracts over the past decade, according to USAspending.gov, the Treasury Department’s government spending tracker. The company also signed a “cooperation agreement” with Ukrainian state-owned defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom last September worth up to $500 million.
Global Ordnance vice president for human resources Carrie Morales told VICE News that the equipment wasn’t requested by the Pentagon, but that the company has “a lot of people in Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe” and that the donation is part of the company’s “humanitarian efforts.”
In other words, a company with a history of corruption and criminal conduct is securing a questionable, if not completely off-the-books contract, to use your tax dollars to send weapons to Ukraine.
The idea of police weaponry flowing to Ukraine from inside the US should come as no surprise to those who have been paying attention. Multiple single departments in America have larger budgets than the entire Ukrainian military. For example, the NYPD’s budget of $11 billion annually nearly doubles that of the entire country of Ukraine, which is just $6 billion.
For a decade, law enforcement in America have been acquiring massive arsenals through the 1033 program and apparently they are overflowing with extra gear.
As we reported over the years, the controversial 1033 program became a source of citizen outrage after images of police armed with military-grade weaponry, including grenade launchers and armored MRAPs, were beamed into people homes across the country during the battlefield-style police response to the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
Activist Post Recommended Book — Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
As many Americans noted, Ferguson, Missouri looked like a war zone, with police kitted out in Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles — virtually indistinguishable from US soldiers.
Shortly after the American public became widely aware, and largely outraged, over the extreme militarization of their local police forces, President Obama signed an Executive Order (EO) that blocked large-caliber weapons, armored vehicles, grenade launchers and other heavy military hardware from being repurposed from battlefields across the globe to small-town USA.
Obama argued at the time that police utilization of such weapons of war casted the police as an “occupying force,” and only served to deepen the divide between police and the community.
“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they’re an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them,” Obama said in announcing the ban in 2015.
This was one of very few notable pro-liberty moves by the Obama administration; however, thanks to the Trump administration, it was overturned. And, now, Biden has picked up where Trump left off and has expanded it.
Despite Biden and Kamala Harris paying lip service to police brutality and riding the waves of the Black Lives Matter movement during their campaign, the president and his vice president have refused to even meet with the group. This is also in spite of the fact that BLM formed a PAC, which helped fund its ad campaigns to mobilize Black voters to go out and vote for Biden.
Getting bad orange man out of the White House has effectively placated the masses, and the huge movements and protests we witnessed prior to November 3, 2020, have fizzled out. Now, the police state is gaining new ground and the expansion of it is being spearheaded by the ones who ran on a platform to rein it in.
According to the folks at SecurityReform.org the flow of military gear under 1033 to police departments has increased when compared to the previous champion of the police state, Donald Trump.
As Security Reform reports:
The flow of military equipment to police does not enhance public safety. In fact, the relationship is precisely the other way around. There is a direct correlation between 1033 program transfers and the number of people shot and killed by police. Not surprisingly, having and using military equipment makes police more violent.
At least 336,863 military-grade items have been transferred to American police agencies through the 1033 program since it began in fiscal year 1997. This includes a range of weapons and equipment and spare parts and accessories for each. The most visible armaments used by police—firearms, vehicles, and aircraft—are itemized below. President Biden could order the Department of Defense to recall this matériel by executive order at any time, but has so far elected not to.
Security Reform has called on Congress to rein in Biden’s police state expansion, but they are apparently unconcerned. The standing army about which the founding fathers warned is now here, and the world’s deadliest police force is armed to the teeth to maintain their hold — and their grip is so tight, they can afford to send gear to Ukraine while maintaining that hold domestically.
Source: The Free Thought Project
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.
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Cops in America Have So Much Militarized Gear, They Are Sending It To Ukraine