Twin Cities Area Police Forces Loaded Up On War Surplus Under President Trump

When protests erupted in Minnesota following the death of George Floyd — the black man who died after a white Minneapolis policeman kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes — many of the law enforcement agencies from the Twin Cities metropolitan area that responded were recent beneficiaries of free excess military materiel from a Pentagon program originally meant to support counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations. At least 10 police departments in the Minneapolis and St. Paul suburbs have obtained either all or nearly all of their Department of Defense military-grade equipment — ranging from $13.56 cartridge magazines to hulking personnel carriers with original price tags surpassing $700,000 — during the first three and a half years of the TrumpFor many years the program, which has distributed more than $7 billion worth of military surplus to local law enforcement agencies since its inception, kept a low profile. That changed in 2014 when police in Ferguson, Mo., deployed donated military equipment against demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of another black man, Michael Brown, by a white policeman.