44 AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: OCTOBER 2017 We were expecting the cops to show up for sure. But it was wild, they just handed the stuff over. Now we got night vision and armored personnel carriers. This is going to make robbing banks and taking on the cops a breeze. “Yeah, this is the ThreePercentville Police Department in Alooska. We need three MRAPs, some night vision goggles and whatever you guys have laying around in terms of plastic explosives.” It’s ridiculous, right? There’s no way that ci- vilians could possibly get military gear for free from the Department of Defense by simply creating a phony website right? That’s got to be very fake news. Well, read the GAO re- port and weep. According to a bomb- shell report from the Gov- ernment Accountability Office, that’s exactly what happened. GAO knows this because they set up a fake website and got more than a million dollars in military equip- ment. Needless to say, foreign and domestic terrorists alike are probably hard at work right now on their own websites and requests for gear. The GAO (a gov- ernment-auditing agency) created a fake website of a fake police department and applied for the surplus goods. The fake agency was handed $1.2 million in weapons. This was bound to hap- pen considering the enorn- mous amount of money that goes to the Depart- ment of Defense. Some estimates put the cost at about $1 trillion or more annually. The GAO used a dirt lot for the fake address for the fake law enforcement agency. According to Zina Mer- ritt, a GAO director who coordinated the investi- gation, there wasn’t any interest on DoD’s part in terms of checking to see who the people requesting free military gear were or what they planned to do with it. After GAO made the request and received the gear, they noted the follow- ing: 1. No one from the mili- tary called to verify infor- mation. 2. The military officials didn’t show up at the “drop” to see who was get- ting the stuff. 3. When the investigators went to the location where the equipment was sup- posed to be handed over from one party to another, the GAO investigators posing as law enforcement didn’t even have to show anyone an ID. 4. GAO investigators were able to get a lot of stuff they never requested. 5. And finally, there ap- pears to be no system (or interest in creating one) to make sure that terrorists can’t get free military gear on US soil handed to them by the Dept. of Defense. The DOD said in the report that it was taking “actions to address iden- tified weaknesses in its excess controlled property program.” The 1033 program has given more than $6 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to more than 8,600 law enforcement agencies since it started in 1991. So let’s see if we can’t tighten things up a bit, shall we? After all, it would be a real shame if next time a Ferguson PD rolls out on protestors with a .50 and armored vehicles they are met with equal or greater military force from the protestors. Otherwise this all makes about as much sense as selling arms to Saudi Ara- bia and Israel at the same time and then asking (with a straight face) why peace in the Middle East seems so elusive. Free military gear available Hopefully the anti-cop crowd didn’t cash in on a total lack of regulation and common sense. Wait...so they made the drop in a dirt lot and didn’t even bother to check anyone’s ID? Are these people insane? APB360.com // 602-497-4606 Asset Tracking | Inventory Management & Audits | Expiration Warning Systems | Training & Education Records | Budget Management | Chain of Custody | Performance Analytics See the results now at APB360.com/LE How many of your officers are wearing expired body armor? If you don’t know, you need APB360. Keep track of your issued gear down to the bootlace. With APB360 you will know within seconds where your equipment and supplies are allocated, see your inventory levels, track expiration dates, and more. It’s simple, fast, and robust. Feel the relief of APB360.