Angie Craig wants to make it easier for cops to get armored vehicles

Bullet marks are visible on the armored police vehicle present at Burnsville standoff on February 18, 2024. (Handout photo via office of Angie Craig)

U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, Democrat of the 2nd Congressional District, has introduced legislation to make it easier for police departments to obtain armored, military-style vehicles.

The bill, which would roll back some of the Biden administration’s modest restrictions on armored vehicle acquisition, is a response to the fatal February shootings of three first responders in Burnsville. One armored vehicle was present at that standoff. 

“Forty-one shots from a gunman’s rifle hit this vehicle as officers from Rosemount and Apple Valley tried to help their brothers,” Craig said in a floor speech on Wednesday. “We may have had even more injury and God forbid death that day, without this vehicle.”

But the death of three first responders despite the presence of an armored vehicle also underscores what the research shows about the effects of militarization on officer and community safety: Military-grade equipment doesn’t necessarily make officers or civilians safer, nor does it deter crime. 

In fact, it may drive a wedge between police and the communities they serve and escalate violent conflicts, increasing the odds of officer-involved shootings, the data show.

The issue came under intense scrutiny in the wake of the militarized response to the unrest following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Researchers soon found that police departments receiving more military surplus gear were more likely to kill not just criminal suspects, but also civilians and dogs.

A widely cited 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, meanwhile, found that militarized police units are most often deployed in minority communities, and that “militarized policing fails to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime.” A survey experiment conducted as part of that study found that seeing media reports of militarized police responses reduced the public’s favorability toward law enforcement.

Not all of the post-Ferguson studies were in agreement. A pair of economics papers published in 2017, for instance, found evidence that the presence of military gear does deter some types of crime. However, those findings could not be replicated several years later, when researchers found that the 2017 studies used faulty, imprecise and incomplete data that ultimately didn’t support the authors’ conclusions.

“Contrary to the claims of those who support the transfer of [military] equipment, these data do not support the conclusion that militarization ‘saves lives,’” researchers concluded.

Nevertheless, military surplus equipment like armored vehicles have proliferated in community police departments in the years since Ferguson. In Minnesota alone, the U.S. Defense Department sent dozens of mine-resistant vehicles to local police agencies — including sheriff’s offices in rural counties where armed standoffs are virtually unheard of — between 2013 and 2020.

As Craig’s bill demonstrates, military gear remains popular among some law enforcement groups as well as the legislators who rely on their support — regardless of what the research says. The bill “would provide peace officers and communities across Minnesota access to critical lifesaving equipment and save lives,” said Brian Peters, executive director of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association. 

The group, which has supported mostly Republicans in recent years, has endorsed Craig in her bid for a fourth term in her highly competitive district.

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