Hey, DoD, can you spare some weapons?
First, they made up the name of a fake police agency. Then, they slapped together a website.
Finally, they filled out a form nicely asking the U.S. Department of Defense for a few military-grade supplies, and a week later they had a $1.2 million stash of night-vision goggles and pipe bomb trainers.
Luckily, it wasn’t MS-13, Tango Blast or any other gang of gun-crazy criminals behind this bold subterfuge. It was the Government Accountability Office.
The sting was part of an assessment designed to test internal controls in the DoD’s excess property program, which allows the feds to hand over extra military equipment and supplies to local law enforcement agencies for free.
Since 1991, the Law Enforcement Support Office program — run by the DoD’s Defense Logistics Agency — has doled out more than $6 billion of property, including everything from mine-resistant vehicles and ammo to refrigerators and sofas.
Houston Police have scored everything from motorized carts to trucks to night vision sniperscope — more than $2.7 million of goods just since 2014, according to data compiled by the University of Idaho’s Steven Radil. League City police stocked up on piles of rifles, while Freeport, Pearland, Richmond and Alvin all got mineresistant vehicles.
Sometimes called the “1033 program” in reference to the section of law authorizing it, the federal handouts came under fire in 2014, when tear gas-tossing police in Ferguson, Mo., showed up in armored vehicles in response to peaceful protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown. Two years later, the National Defense Authorization Act charged the GAO with assessing the program’s controls — and the results were damning, as outlined in a 76-page report released this month.
GAO investigators found the DLA did not routinely verify ID when police — or faux police — pick up their supplies. And on top of that, the agency doled out extra supplies when the GAO showed up to get its order.
“Furthermore,” the report notes, “although we were approved to receive over 100 items and the transfer documentation reflects this amount, we were provided more items than we were approved for.”
While the order didn’t appear to include mine-resistant vehicles or AR-15s, it did include some potentially dangerous items, like simulated rifles and simulated pipe bombs, which could potentially be lethal “if modified with commercially available items,” the report notes.
The assessment also looked at specific states’ uses of equipment obtained through the program. In Texas, for example, police agencies in San Marcos and Hays County reported using mineresistant vehicles to rescue more than 600 stranded people from rising floodwaters in 2015.
The GAO report offered a series of recommendations for the program’s improvement, including a fraud risk assessment and bolstered internal controls after the approval process.
Although the shocking sting operation flew a bit under the radar in some quarters, the ACLU certainly took notice.
“Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up,” ACLU legislative counsel Kanya Bennett wrote in a blog post.