California schools receive 18-tonne armoured vehicle
School authorities in California have come under fire after acquiring an 18-tonne demilitarized armoured vehicle under a programme which sees the US Department of Defense offload excess military hardware.
The San Diego Unified Schools District - the administrative body for more than 226 educational facilities in the city of San Diego - received the vehicle earlier this year under the Pentagon's Excess Property Program - also referred to as the 1033 Program - which sees unwanted military hardware distributed to police departments around the US.
The '1033' has come in for considerable criticism in America in recent months after the police response to public protests following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to widespread questioning of the militarization of US police forces.
Much of the equipment used by police in Ferguson - including armoured vehicles - was also acquired under the 1033 scheme. The programme has distributed more than $5bn worth of equipment since 1997.
In the case of the SDUSD, the vehicle in question is an 18-tonne, 6x6 Caiman mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle (MRAP), designed primarily for troop transport in combat zones and which has been widely used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here it is being unloaded at Morse High School in San Diego, where it is was to be refurbished and further demilitarized by students taking part in the school's Auto Collision and Refinishing programme:
According to local news channel KPBS which broke the story last week, the SDUSD's police department - consisting around 80 officers and staff to service the district's 132,000 students and 14,000 employees - got the MRAP for a knockdown cost of $5,000 to cover delivery from Texas. It usually costs around $730,000, so they got a good deal.
However, the question of what the schools district actually needs an 18-tonne armoured vehicle for has naturally been raised, with criticism coming even from the district's board of trustees.
"The acquisition of an armoured vehicle by our school police is a misguided priority," trustee Scott Barnett said in a statement.
"We have hundreds of worn-out vehicles and 10 very old police cruisers protecting kids every day," he added.
"These police cars each have over 130,000 miles on them. Replacing these vital assets should be our number one priority."
Barnett also claimed that the board of trustees had not been informed of the acquisition prior to it going through in April.
Meanwhile Daily Beast writer Andy Hinds - whose twin daughters attend one of the 226 schools in the unified district - summed up parents' concerns with a post entitled 'Why Does My Kids’ Elementary School Need a Tank?'.
"Whoever pulled the trigger (so to speak) on this acquisition may have just been caught up in the moment," Hinds wrote.
"I understand the impulse to act on a good deal. Some people just can’t resist.
"My father-in-law, for instance, has bought at least three cars that he didn’t need just because they were cheap."
Police chiefs have defended the purchase, saying they intend to refit the MRAP as a rescue vehicle, and had been on the lookout for one for a while.
“When we have an emergency at a school, we’ve got to get in and save kids,” Captain Joe Florentino of the SDUSD Police Department told Joe Yerardi of inewsource.
“Our idea is: How can we get in and pull out a classroom at a time of kids if there’s an active shooter?
"If there’s a fire [or] if there’s an earthquake, can we rip down a wall? Stuff like that."
In a news conference held after the story broke, SDUSD Police Chief Ruben Littlejohn strenuously denied that the MRAP was 'a tank', or anything like it. The district also released computer-generated images of what the vehicle could look like after refurb and repainting.
"There will be medical supplies in the vehicle. There will be teddy bears in the vehicle," KBPS reported Littlejohn as saying.
The refurbished MRAP was originally to have been unveiled at a press conference next month. However it is due to come up for discussion at the next meeting of the district's board of trustees on September 24, with the question of whether to keep it likely to loom large.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the SDUSD's police department were not the only ones to get an MRAP - the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department also got one during the summer.
Which they presumably put with the three grenade launchers and 61 M16 assault rifles they got in 2001.
