Not mentioned, apart from an aside about an infamous case of police misconduct in Georgia, was the subject of Paul's first Ferguson op-ed, also published in Time. "We must demilitarize the police," wrote Paul in August,
as he listed the ways that local police departments obtained and
misused surplus military equipment. "The militarization of our law
enforcement is due to an unprecedented expansion of government power in
this realm. It is one thing for federal officials to work in conjunction
with local authorities to reduce or solve crime. It is quite another
for them to subsidize it."
Three months later, as Evan McMorris-Santoro reports,
the anti-"militarization" is nowhere. Even by Washington's amnesiac
standards, the efforts to reform the 1033 program that makes military
gear available to police departments faded absurdly fast. An Aug. 31 Politico story reported on lawmakers' optimism that Ferguson "actually will lead to some policy changes." One week later, Politico
published a report about how "substantive action on the federal level
is an uphill battle," and that lobbyists for the cops were likely to
save the military gear program.
So they did. While the National Sheriffs Association declined
comment, the Fraternal Order of Police made executive director Jim Pasco
available to talk about how the skeptics—like Paul—were defeated.
"Nothing much has happened except that some members of Congress had
kneejerk reactions to the optics of Ferguson or the rhetoric of
Ferguson," said Pasco. "They thought there was something problematic
about the equipment they saw on the streets. In the intervening period,
some of them have come to see that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
It’s not what the equipment looks like, it’s what its utility is."
According to Pasco, FOP members reached out to "maybe 80 percent of
senators and half the House." Since militarization was at the greatest
risk in the Democratic Senate, the disparity made sense. As
McMorris-Santoro reported, the departing Senate's blockade on Republican
amendments made it impossible for Paul to attach anything to a passable
bill. And the clock's basically run out for reform. A new Congress is
coming in, but the FOP doesn't see it as particularly likely to
dismantle 1033.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-11-25/how-police-unions-stopped-congress-from-militarization-reform
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