I Bark, Therefore I Yam

THE I.V. DRIP: It was unfortunate Sheriff Bill Brown wasn’t on hand at the Board of Supervisors this Tuesday, allowing one of the supervisors to ask, “Is that a grenade launcher in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Brown not being there, it fell to his aide-de-camp and straight man Undersheriff Don Patterson to explain to the much-surprised supervisors how his department had secured not one, but two grenade launchers. Who knew? Certainly not the supervisors. Not us, either.

This revelation came to light as part of the ongoing national debate on the militarization of police departments, sparked by the radioactive meltdown now consuming Ferguson, Missouri, where police shot and killed an unarmed black teenager suspected of strong-arm robbery. That the Ferguson PD looks and acts more like an invading army than the law enforcement agency of our Andy of Mayberry imaginations ​has been lost on nobody. As we wonder how we got here, it’s come to light that an obscure agency with the Department of Defense has been quietly giving away vast quantities of hand-me-down military hardware to cash-strapped law enforcement agencies eager to get the upper hand on all the twitchy-fingered psycho killers out there who may be packing armor-piercing heat. But as Ferguson illustrates, we’ve gone past the tipping point of overkill. Thanks to the sort of data-chomping meta-journalism the internet makes possible, the New York Times put together an interactive map of the United States, detailing ​— ​county by county ​— ​where all this equipment has gone. Santa Barbara, it turns out, got enough to start its own air force and invade a small impoverished nation.

In addition to the grenade launchers, Santa Barbara law enforcement agencies have procured free of charge 350 night-vision goggles, 123 assault rifles, 50 pieces of body armor, 12 pistols, six helicopters, and one armored vehicle. When Supervisor Doreen Farr described the armored vehicle as “the BearCat,” the well-known armored urban assault vehicle, Patterson quickly set her straight. “We have the Bear,” he stated. “We have a full-grown Bear, not a BearCat.” (Italics added for emphasis.) The City of Santa Barbara Police Department, it should be noted, owns a BearCat ​— ​which it procured with $225,000 in Homeland Security money and uses mostly as bulletproof eye candy at meet-and-greet community events and also on occasion in actual crisis situations. By contrast, County Sheriff deputies roll out for action in the much bigger, much badder Bear.