Lonny’s tank, part 2
How war comes home
Back in June 2014, when Lonny Pulkrabek’s office acquired a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle colloquially known as an “MRAP” without soliciting input from any of the Johnson County’s public officials or the public itself, Lonny went on a media tour to “sell” the freshly repainted military vehicle to the public.
“It’s a tool we hope we never have to use,” he said to the reporters, over and over, “I can’t emphasize that enough. We don’t want to have to use it. We hope that nothing is ever bad enough that we have to get this thing out” (emphasis added).
That was a comforting message if you were generally inclined to give our local law enforcement the benefit of the doubt. Sure, a military vehicle built for combat zones, which primary task was to protect soldiers from improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, explosively formed penetrators, underbody mines and small arms fire threats seemed a tad unfitting to roll on the streets of our neighborhoods, but hey, they are saying they won’t bring it out unless they really have to, and who knows what will happen in the future, there is no harm in this thing sitting in a garage.
There was one problem, though: this was the narrative Pulkrabek was feeding to the press. The official “Armored Vehicle (MRAP) Justification” that the Sheriff’s office had to file with Michigan’s 1033 Program’s office in order to obtain the military truck in the first place told a very different story.
The 1033 Program requires a law enforcement agency to fill out a questionnaire to justify an armored vehicle request.
Starting from the very first answer to that questionnaire, Pulkrabek’s application zeroed in on one specific theme that was abjectly absent from the public messaging in his media tour: Special Response Teams aka SWAT units.
The document starts out with a seemingly benign question about the total number of full-time officers. Yet, in his answer to this straightforward inquiry, Pulkrabek goes out of his way to underscore the number of police officers assigned and trained to serve in SRT/SWAT units — not just under his direct command, but across all of the municipalities in the county:
Hmm, that’s interesting. How is the number of SWAT officers relevant to our county’s need for a military vehicle? Certainly it doesn’t have anything to do with a probability of an extreme, let’s-hope-it-never-happens situation that Lonny was alluding to in public…
Unless those 60 “tactical officers” intend to use this vehicle on a more or less regular basis, but that seems contrary to the “this thing will hopefully just sit in the garage” motif, doesn’t it?
But maybe it’s just a non-consequential peculiarity, let’s suspend our judgment for a moment and read the document just a bit further:
Here we have it, the primary intended use for the MRAP is, in fact, SWAT/SRT support!
And if we read the rest of this answer, it becomes pretty unambiguous that the “We hope that nothing is ever bad enough that we have to get this thing out” line was, well, a lie:
Now, leaving aside the absurdity of the idea of using a behemoth 18,000-pound vehicle known for collapsing bridges, and notorious for being prone to toppling on rough roads, sharp turns, and uneven terrain for “flood and blizzard response as a high mobility vehicle”, the “Special Response Team” focus of the application might not immediately seem completely contradictory to the “awful situations-only” narrative — until you recall that 79 percent of SWAT deployments nationwide involve the use of a SWAT team to search a person’s home, and more than 60 percent involve searches for drugs.
Locally, out of a total of seven Special Response Team deployments in Iowa City between June 2013 and June 2014, three were executions of drug search warrants.
As a matter of fact, the 1033 questionnaire itself makes a point of asking whether the law-enforcement agency is operating in a so-called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA)— defined as “a significant center of illegal drug production, manufacturing, importation, or distribution” such that “a significant increase in allocation of Federal resources is necessary to respond adequately to drug related activities in the area”.
According to Pulkrabek’s application, Johnson County is not a HIDTA only because “it did not file the paperwork in the prescribed time to be declared as one”:
Contrary to the story Lonny fed to the press, right from the start the Sheriff’s office had wide-ranging plans for deploying the MRAP, with the primary focus of supporting the SRT teams in the “War on Drugs.”
Not that it makes it any better, but it also turns out Johnson County is not an outlier in this regard. A nation-wide 2015 analysis of 450 local requests for an MRAP, filed over two years, revealed that the two most common reasons agencies requested a mine-resistant vehicle was to combat drugs and assist SWAT raids:
Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement. Almost half of all departments indicated that they sit within a region designated by the federal government as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. (Nationwide, only 17 percent of counties are HIDTAs.) One out of six departments were prepared to use the vehicles to serve search or arrest warrants on individuals who had yet to be convicted of a crime. And more than half of the departments indicated they were willing to deploy armored vehicles in a broad range of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids.
In this light, it makes total sense that the Sheriff’s office paid the MRAP’s initial shipping, painting, towing, driver training, and graphics fees to the tune of $10,875 from the drug forfeiture proceeds — they likely considered it to be an investment that will recoup itself many times over.
So, seven years later, should we really be surprised that the “How will it be used?” question that was immediately followed by a reassuring lie “It won’t be!” officially evolved into “How is it used” list that includes “standby for SRT callouts” as the first bullet point?
Or should we be surprised that the MRAP had at least 19 (!) documented deployments since 2014, the majority of them related to drug, firearm, shooting, and homicide investigations after a crime has already occurred, two of them during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer of 2020 where the vehicle was parked on “standby” near the protests — a tactic that is widely recognized as intimidation aimed to chill our First Amendment right to peacefully assemble and protest — and three others, this year, to serve warrants in residential neighborhoods?
But the most disturbing part of this story is the complete and utter lack of accountability. Lonny Pulkrabek blatantly lied to the public right from the start, with no consequences to his office or his career. In the seven years since the MRAP acquisition, its stated deployment policy was flagrantly violated over and over, and no one has gotten so much as a slap on the wrist. And when Iowa City, the largest municipality in our county, officially requested the Sheriff’s Office to divest from the MRAP, Pulkrabek didn’t even consider the request worthy of an official response. And indeed, why would he bother?
If you remain unconvinced about the dangers of trusting our law enforcement officials to stay true to their word when it comes to keeping police militarization in check, the history of the SWAT teams themselves serves as another cautionary tale.
As you probably know, “SWAT team” is a generic term for a law enforcement unit that uses military equipment and tactics to resolve violent confrontations.
One of the originators of the acronym, Daryl F. Gates, reportedly favored the name “Special Weapons Attack Team”, but the “attack” part was eventually deemed too belligerent, and Gates later accepted the less-aggressive-sounding “Special Weapons and Tactics”, originally coined by the Philadelphia Police Department a few years earlier.
Although the birth of some of the very first SWAT units can be traced to the use of military tactics and weapons to suppress large-scale protests and civil unrest and stamping out bank robberies by escalating them into deadly shootouts while they were in progress, the public was sold on the concept of SWAT teams largely in the context of a few high-profile armed confrontations that shook the country in the 60s, starting with the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966.
Those incidents seeded the idea that regular police are ill-equipped to deal with “exceptional”, unusually volatile and/or violent events, and that the risk of such events is high enough to warrant the creation of dedicated police units operating outside of the traditional norms of policing.
The primary focus of many of these early special units was being a viable response to sniper situations, and, with the help of the press, the law enforcement more or less had a public mandate for this expansion of tactics and mission.
What happened next is often characterized as “mission creep”, but, in our opinion, the true root cause is the lack of any meaningful accountability of our police departments to the public.
The War on Drugs gave the often-idle SWAT teams a new purpose, and between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, the number and usage of SWAT teams in the US had grown tenfold. The public was largely unaware of this drastic expansion.
By 2005, SWAT teams were deployed 50,000 times every year, almost 80% of the time to serve search warrants, most often for drugs. By 2015 that number had increased to nearly 80,000 times a year. These teams commonly execute routine warrants in “no-knock” raids, bursting into homes with a show of force that often far exceeds the threat to them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the SWAT raids statistics also reveal stark, often extreme, racial disparities in the use of “tactical teams” locally, especially in cases involving search warrants.
Despite the fact that the aggressive enforcement of the War on Drugs has long lost its public mandate, with two-thirds of Americans favoring treatment, not jailing of users of hard drugs, the insanity continues, because… well, see above re: accountability.
A couple of months after Johnson County’s Sheriff’s Office acquired an MRAP, The Des Moines Register published an editorial condemning police militarization in general, as well as an apparent police fixation on military vehicles in particular. It’s worth reading in whole, but we’ll close out here with just one quote:
What is really important is the difference between the purpose of this sort of military equipment and ordinary tools of law enforcement. It is fair to say that local law enforcement has failed if it must resort to the armaments of war to deal with crime and unrest in their communities.
The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of a local police department is the relationship it has with the people in its community. If that relationship is based on trust, on the idea that the police are there to protect the citizens rather than to go to war against them, then there will be no need for weapons of war in the police departments and sheriffs’ offices in Iowa.
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If you agree that our police don’t need any further militarization, here are a couple of meaningful actions you can take to reverse the trend locally:
- Share this article and its prequel with your network. Email works particularly well for long-form reads like this one.
- Visit https://scrapthemrap.org/ to add your voice to our petition asking the Johnson County officials to dispose of the MRAP and to not acquire any other “replacement” military-style vehicle. When you sign, make sure to click “Send me updates on this issue”.
- Join us on Monday, December 6 at 9am on Zoom or in-person for a Board of Supervisors’ budget work session where our current Sheriff is expected to ask for a $250,000+ budget expansion to acquire a yet another military-style vehicle.
Questions, comments? Drop us a line at team@icpdwatch.us
