Bulletin: A New Original
From RealClearInvestigations

How Cops in a Beach-Blanket Town Hit Bingo

... With Surplus Military Muscle

New Article by Susan Katz Keating in RealClearInvestigations

Publishing Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019

It's a shame the 1960's teen-idol duo of Frankie and Annette  can't star in Delaware's version of "Beach Blanket Bingo." Its plot has way better material than their skimpy bikini-and-brawn surf clunkers.

That's because, as Susan Katz Keating reports forRealClearInvestigations, the Dewey Beach police department really did hit something of a bingo jackpot when it acquired $2.8 million in surplus Pentagon armaments. The tiy full-time force of eight -- in a revenue-strapped town with a year-round population of 341 -- turned the haul into a fly-by-night, sale-or-barterslush fundfor purposes at oncequasi-justifiable andverydubious.

The events you are about to witness are true:

• Under the Pentagon's military-surplus-to-cops program, Dewey Beach got Humvees, rifles, pistols, all-terrain vehicles, a grenade launcher, and 10 sets of pajamas -- 2,000 items in all.
• But, finding the feds' hand-me-downs to be largely junk, the cops turned the inventory into essentially a combination Army-Navy store, patronage machine and slush fund on the hush-hush. It funded police operations, swapped gear for favors, turned cops into local Cub Scout do-gooders and who knows what else.
• The town manager got suspicious in 2016 when he had to sign off on two police vehicles with all the bells and whistles, an extravagance that the cops had already somehow raised the money for: $100,000.
  
• Just how tight a ship the cops were runningcame further into questionafter a police sergeant got his pistol belt stolen--lock, stock, Taser, and gun barrel--from his unlocked car,as he stopped off for the night at his girlfriend's place.
• An outside investigation was ordered.
• The salt-water-taffy plotgot stickierwhen a retaliatory petition accused the townsupeof a litany of offenses, including randomly shouting the word "fornication," wearing pajamas to work without underwear -- and messing with the police department. 
• The investigation eventually turned up just where much of the sizable arsenal had been secreted: to a gated yard a couple of towns over, plusan employee's farm and an auto body shop.
• But publication of the probeset offa classic townmeeting-hall hubbub,leading to a lawsuit by thelocalgadfly after he was arrested by the sergeant who lost hisgunbelt.

The kicker is that the Pentagon says that, as far as it's concerned, everything was on the up-and-up with Dewey Beach's cop shop. But critics undoubtedly see the episode as ammo against the creeping militarization of police.

Onepolice lieutenantisn't one bit sorry. "Some people think it's bad for the police department to be self-sufficient," he toldRealClearInvestigations.  "Some people in the community want us to ride around in cars that have 200,000 miles on 'em, two flat tires, and windows that don't roll up." But not him.

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