Does Surplus Military Equipment Reduce Crime?

In 2017, the Trump Administration restored the access of local law enforcement agencies to military weapons and some other types of surplus military equipment (SME) that had been prohibited by the Obama Administration. The Justice Department background paper used to justify this decision cited two papers published by the American Economic Association (AEA). These papers used SME data collected with a 2014 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and concluded that SME, supplied to local law enforcement by the federal government via the 1033 program, reduces crime. In this paper, we demonstrate that the findings of these studies are not credible due to problems with the data. Using new, more detailed audit data on 1033 SME, we show that the 2014 data is flawed and that when the new data is used with the models of the two AEA papers, there is no evidence that 1033 SME reduces crime.