The troop withdrawal created a ton of surplus armament. Through the so-called “1033 program,” police departments can acquire excess military gear from the Pentagon for free.
Source: https://www.stephensemler.com/p/how-the-iraq-war-turbocharged-police
Gotta be careful not to link correlation with causation here. Could just be that vendors started selling to cops a lot more in the 2010s for different reasons.
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Maybe, but this plot doesn’t show that.
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