Is police militarization an issue in Wichita and Sedgwick County?
Demilitarization of police has become a national topic in the wake of police response to some Black Lives Matter protests, and with the national debate, concerns about the military background of some officers have been raised and the federal 1033 program has come under scrutiny.
Only one law enforcement agency in Sedgwick County has received equipment through the Law Enforcement Support Office, more commonly known as the 1033 program. In 2013, the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office received a $658,000 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle through the program. While the Wichita Police Department has similar vehicles, they did not come through the program.
In June, Wichita police used an armored vehicle during the BLM protests in Wichita, later saying that it was shot at during the protest.
Gabrielle Griffie, the executive director of Project Justice ICT, a Wichita group that started during the protests, said she thinks police didn’t need the special equipment used during the protests that she felt had little other usage. Police drove back protesters with riot gear, tear gas, flash grenades and foam bullets.
“The police are like maintaining an arsenal of ... military-grade equipment to use on the people they are supposed to protect when the people they are protecting complain about them killing innocent people with impunity,” Griffie said.
The 1033 program offers surplus military equipment to law enforcement agencies for free. The equipment that’s available can include guns, vehicles and first aid equipment.
Both Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay and Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said police militarization is not a problem in their departments and that there should be limits on the gear to which police have access. The 1033 program does have restrictions, including prohibitions against vehicles that inherently contain weaponry, large caliber weapons and ammunition, military uniforms and explosives.
“I understand the look of it sometimes,” Easter said, “and yes, we are the police department or the sheriff’s office, and yes it looks militarized, but on the flip side … I can give you case after case after case of folks that are militarized that are shooting other people, shooting at us or killing us with those militarized guns, so there has to be a happy medium there somewhere.”
Easter and Ramsay said there are items in the 1033 program that aren’t used for force but are necessary for law enforcement, especially for smaller agencies that might not have the budget for them. As an example, Ramsay said his former department in Minnesota received tourniquets through the program.
Roots of militarization
Easter said the militarization of police, which he said should be called matching firepower, started after a Feb. 1997 shootout with bank robbers in Los Angeles. The two armor-clad robbers had high-power rifles while officers showed up with handguns and shotguns.
Officers eventually went to a nearby gun store to borrow rifles, according to the Los Angeles Times. Eleven officers were wounded in the shoot-out and both robbers were killed.
The Defense Department’s 1033 program has been heavily criticized since the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer fatally shot Michael Brown. Images showed police carrying rifles and roaming streets with armed vehicles, similar to what was seen in Minneapolis at the end of May.
In 2015, President Obama issued an executive order that banned police departments from using certain military equipment. President Trump removed those restrictions in an executive order in 2017.
As of June, there were 8,200 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies participating in the 1033 program, including roughly 75 agencies in Kansas that received more than $4.6 million in supplies.
Since the program started in 1990, the value of transfers has mushroomed:
Transfers went from being worth $440,000 in 1990 to about $290 million in 2019
Guns and gun accessories went from 13,259 items between 1990 and 1999 to 201,813 from 2010 to 2019
Some of the increase can be attributed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. More than 1.75 million troops served during the wars before the U.S. mostly withdrew from the countries, leaving additional wartime gear up for grabs.
The Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) heavily armored vehicles were one of the pieces of equipment.
Rise of the armored vehicles
Chief Ramsay said MRAPs and vehicles like it made people question police having military equipment.
Since 2013, the Defense Department has transferred to police departments 1,059 MRAP vehicles, which were designed to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan against roadside bombs.
On June 18, when a local TV reporter tweeted that the Moundsville, Ohio, police department had just received an MRAP, the tweet and response went viral. Moundsville has a population of about 8,500.
“Are the Moundsville police going to Afghanistan or something?” a reader tweeted back.
In Kansas, the Coffey County Sheriff’s Office received an MRAP in 2013 to cover a population of about 8,500 people.
The Wichita Police Department has an armored vehicle through a Department of Homeland Security grant and two others that were provided to the department through a will.
“Those are reserves,” Ramsay said about the vehicles. “There has to be strong oversight when those are used.”
Sheriff Easter said the MRAP is used for search warrants, mass disturbances and SWAT, which is staffed by the sheriff’s office and the WPD.
While the vehicle was free, the sheriff’s office is responsible for its maintenance, which so far has been estimated to cost about $15,000. It has been used roughly 15 times a year, including once a month for training, the sheriff’s office said.
Wichita police Capt. Kevin Kochenderfer, who was the SWAT commander until being promoted, said the MRAP is bigger than the WPD vehicles and is difficult to maneuver in an urban setting. He only recalled SWAT using it a couple times.
Veterans as officers
Like the wartime equipment, many veterans have also found their way to police forces, adding to the perception of militarization.
An International Association of Chiefs of Police study, done in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, aimed to address issues combat veterans face when being employed as officers. The 2009 study noted positive and negative attributes.
It said veterans have positive skills such as “leadership, physical fitness, and discipline” and a sense of pride to serve their community. It also found that changing the rules of engagement takes time and that “depression, anger, withdrawal, and family issues create a low tolerance for citizen complaints and heightens the reintegration process.”
Kochenderfer, a U.S Army veteran, said that despite what some have claimed, he doesn’t think the military background is the problem with veterans becoming officers.
“It’s not about the training they received, in my opinion, having been there and how I (came) to being on SWAT,” Kochenderfer said. “It helped me to mature a lot faster. I didn’t have the ‘us or them mentality.’”
The problem is training that doesn’t conform to what he hoped were rigorous police department policies and cadets’ interpretation of training that doesn’t meet those standards, he said.
He said the military’s rules of engagement are much less stringent than the policies that a police department should have. And, although some of the military tactics have a lot of “bleed over” into police training, the proper policies and training on those policies would reduce the crossover.
In his case, he said it’s made him calmer under stress, meaning he’s less likely to make a mistake during high-pressure situations.
Kochenderfer said the WPD, like many other police departments around the country, actively recruits veterans but that the department doesn’t have nearly as many as when he joined in 1994.
He said the SWAT team, which was deployed during the June protests and used the armored vehicle, has a handful of veterans out of the team of around 40. He said they aren’t green berets or Navy SEALs like most people picture when they hear officers with military experience.
Kochenderfer didn’t know how many of the Wichita’s roughly 655 commissioned officers have or do serve in the military. Wichita spokesperson Kevin Wheeler said they do not have a list of how many officers have military experience. “Our active military and veterans have been valuable additions to our department,” Wheeler said in an email.
The sheriff’s office said it does not track employees’ military experience.
Police reform
Griffie, the Project Justice ICT executive director, says change needs to happen within local law enforcement. Her group’s demands for police reform include a gradual defunding of police and renegotiating the Fraternal Order of Police contract.
Griffie pointed to a section in the contract that requires WPD to provide 600 rounds a year for each officer to train. That would be at least 290,000 rounds a year for police department’s 486 patrol officers.
The contract also says SWAT members can get as many as 4,800 rounds.
She said those numbers are excessive for a department designed to protect the people.
Kochenderfer said equipment and training ammunition is essential, saying additional firearm training helps police be better prepared when they do need to fire.
“You can’t erase that mistake,” Kochenderfer said. “I wish we had a budget to practice more.”
About the national movement for police reform, he said it’s about time.
“It should have been going around a long time ago,” Kochenderfer said. “Fortunately, we haven’t had those problems here.”
Contributing: Shirsho Dasgupta and Tara Copp of McClatchy