I am mulling all of the possible reasons this would happen. I am interested in opinions and thought I would throw this out there.
2.A false flag operation by feds. Maybe an assassination.
I was in Mexico for work a few years ago. A truck drove by full of “police” in tactical SWAT gear. Our bodyguard told me that they could be real cops, could be cartel or could be both.
Having been involved in military logistics for most my career, here’s my take. But, first, a story. A cargo plane crash occurred on a base where a friend was working. It was common practice that when they couldn’t find stuff, they’d take any opportunity to “scrap it out.” If there was a fire, then whatever they couldn’t find was in that fire and could therefore be scrapped out. My friend was on the panel looking into the cause of the crash. In a meeting he announced he had found the cause of the crash. He presented a table of the things that had “been onboard” and their weight. He said, “The plane was four times over its maximum takeoff weight.” He was reassigned to a different job.
So how does stuff get “lost.” There’s a myriad of ways. In my book a principal cause is the commanding officer declares that X needs to be up and running by Y and if it isn’t heads will roll. So, stuff is pulled from inventory and thrown into X and before the techs can go in and do the paperwork the next heads-will-roll crisis hits, and the paperwork never reflects what happened to the inventory. Some version of this is always happening along with a chronic shortage of trained people to do all the paperwork along with archaic systems that are difficult to make function even on the occasions when they are working.
Another thing is just how the inventory works. Y is a subcomponent of X. X gets installed in a vehicle, but Y is still on the books. Y is now “lost.” Another thing is you can’t imagine how big some of these warehouses are. You could lose a Buick. Put something on the wrong shelf and it might as well be on the moon. It is now “lost.”
And of course, some stuff just walks out the door to be repurposed into beer money at a scrap yard. But my guess is that’s the lowest amount of “lost” stuff.
I am not sure what 'this' means but I am going to take a shot using my conspiracy theorist mind set.
What you have when you put all this police equipment together with a large influx of military age (and probably trained) men is what you would need if you wanted to internally disrupt civil order during a overthrow of a nation.
Put a bogus police force on the streets in cars indistinguishable from the real thing, including that these cars are equipped with communications equipment that can listen in and make calls on police frequencies?
The mayhem that a large enough force of phony cops could do is inestimable.
And considering how low the professionalism has sunk after decades of lowered standards for admission to the profession, the winnowing of the ranks from "Defund the Police" efforts of the Democrats and aging out of the experienced officers, it would be quite easy for a force of phony cops to totally take over a large city like NYC using a phony police force.
So the unsavory can imitate cops for whatever nefarious reason.