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If you ever work with DHS you discover that their primary purpose is to distribute pork around the country. They fund tons of small grants to first responders, a fire truck here, some flashlights there, an armored assault vehicle over yonder. Having worked with small town first reponders, they often have people whose only job is to write grant petitions and they ask for all sorts of crazy stuff because "why not?". That and the civil forfeiture cash which the police get to keep have resulted in cops having lots of high end swat stuff they could never afford if the taxpayers of their tiny hamlets were paying.

Is this a good thing? Well, federal funding of unnecessary offensive capability to small town police forces seems to me to be a textbook case of waste, whatever your take on the stat of law enforcement mindset.

About a year after 9-11....a small town from near where I grew up in Alabama....put in a request via their one-cop department to acquire night-vision goggles. The request never flowed via the town council or the mayor. Six months later, this package arrives and it’s a set of semi-new night-vision goggles. The cop goes out that weekend and uses them to check on back road activity. One of the city council guys comes by...asks questions....and goes ballistic over the necessity for the ‘toy’. They order the cop to put the item on the fed page to ‘sell’ (the rule is that it must go to another cop-department under the program).

Five miles away, another cop department (five cops in this one) put a request for a speed boat to use on the river next to the hydro-electric dam....to protect it from 9-11 attacks. Yeah, it’s no joke...they inserted the wording in there. Six months later....they get a $8k fishing boat, which they actively used for drunken boating and more fines on river activities. No, the town council didn’t approve this acquisition either. But in this case, because of the fines....no one said nothing and they kept the boat as part of their revenue program for the town.