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Comment by amcnett | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to see a number of mine-resistant vehicles associated with very rural counties in Washington State. Not being completely sure whether a mine-resistant vehicle was a tank or not, I googled the term and came across this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/as-wars-wind-down--small-town-cops-inh...

Choice quote from the article:

“Here’s the thing,” Shellmyer says. “Washington, Iowa, has 8,000 people. We have an MRAP now. We have a SWAT team. We have [police] dogs, and we have a SWAT team transportation vehicle that’s not armored.

The city councilman began to think: “Goodness, this is overkill.”

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If we're lucky, those massive armored vehicles will be parked behind the station, and left to deteriorate. They're so expensive to operate, small departments are loathe to actually use them. If we're unlucky, we get the events in Ferguson, MO.

Some years back I was in the position of managing a few systems for a nonprofit. It had been awarded equipment through a donation program. Some of this was usable. Some ... was not. One particular item turned out to be such a white elephant that it was literally more sensible to try to sell it and replace it with something more economical. Which other branches of the nonprofit were doing, though I never convinced the GM of ours to do.

Equipment that's not actually usable isn't an asset.

(And yes, I'm keeping this all pretty intentionally vague.)

Let me guess. Was it actually a white elephant?

Despite certain outward similarities, no.

A white elephant would have been more useful.

Yup. Nonprofits are not often not very sophisticated about technology and it often takes them a long time to learn that some donations are just not worth the trouble.

I once worked for a non-profit with a video production program for teenagers. They accepted some 1970s film editing consoles that were donated by a local college. The executive director did not realize just how impractical and cost-prohibitive it is to teach kids how to edit movies on 16mm film. I was pretty proud of myself when I found someone to take those editing consoles.

I live in Puyallup, Washington and we've received (what I believe to be) an MRAP. (It looks like one, but I've yet to see it outside of the building so I haven't gotten a very good look at it.) It's housed in the police/fire station downtown.

Puyallup is a "city" of just under 40,000. Our crime isn't even too horrible (http://www.piercecountycrimedata.org/NeighborhoodCrime/index...)

But we have an MRAP. It might be Pierce County's MRAP, housed in our building, but even then compared to the rest of Washington state, Pierce County is pretty tame.

Although, we do rank #9 in the U.S. for meth labs. So there's that. http://www.kplu.org/post/pierce-county-among-top-10-us-numbe...

Maybe the MRAP was requested in the event that the Puyallup Fair (the WA state fair for the uninitiated) gets totally out of control.

RE: the meth labs, etc. it would be interesting to see usage data for the equipment. Who knows...if an occupied meth lab is raided every week, the vehicle could make sense (not that I have any tactical expertise in the slightest).

Haha, you actually made me laugh by saying Puyallup fair. It will never be the Washington state fair in my eyes!

Anyway, good point about the fair. It's a big event... much bigger than the pumpkin festival that Keene, NH got its MRAP for.

I wonder if there's a way to get that information. I'd like to see how the gear's being used. Judgements aside, I think it'd be interesting to see.

I organized Washington's results, if anybody's interested: http://www.ericlagergren.com/blog/washington-military-surplu...

I live in Walla Walla and I don't see our MRAP in the NYT spreadsheet, but here's the article: http://union-bulletin.com/news/2014/apr/16/walla-walla-swat-.... Absolute madness.

Apparently Walla Walla received two "mine resistant vehicles"

I organized the list here: http://www.ericlagergren.com/blog/washington-military-surplu...

(pardon the link to my own blog!)

Y'know, there was a SWAT callout to Burbank in the last month or so for a guy who surrendered by the time they were entering the area. I distinctly heard one of the WWPD officers mention getting "the vehicle" just after they started acknowledging the pages.

Someone should ask if they actually drove that thing all the way to Burbank and back.

Hey, I'm a reporter at the U-B and I was actually talking to the NYT reporter who got that data yesterday. The NYT's request was granted in May 2014, and we got our MRAP in April, so he said it's most likely we were just after the cutoff for the Pentagon's dataset when the request was filled. The mine-resistant vehicles are separate things, as far as I know, because other MRAPs were listed as such on the spreadsheet.

From your article: "The supply of extra MRAPs is likely to only increase — the government spent $50 billion to produce 27,000 of them in 2007."

Can someone explain the math to me? It sounds like each vehicle costs $2 million.

Operational costs will prevent most of the MRAPs from seeing any use. 6MPG is horrible, and fuel costs are a big budgetary item for most public safety departments.

> Operational costs will prevent most of the MRAPs from seeing any use.

Or, alternatively, MRAPs will provide the justification for greater budget demands.

Does the federal government not provide funding for their operation as well?

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