Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA.
Department of Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2021 Feb;5(2):194-204. doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-00995-5. Epub 2020 Dec 7.
In 2017, the Trump Administration restored local law enforcement agencies' access 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. These papers used SME data collected with a 2014 Freedom of Information Act request and concluded that SME, supplied to local law enforcement by the federal government via the 1033 Program, reduces crime. Here we show that the findings of these studies are not credible due to problems with the data. Using more detailed audit data on 1033 SME, we show that the 2014 data are flawed and that the more recent data provide no evidence that 1033 SME reduces crime.
2017 年，特朗普政府恢复了地方执法机构获取军事武器和其他一些被奥巴马政府禁止的剩余军事装备（SME）的权限。司法部用于证明这一决定的背景文件援引了美国经济协会发表的两份文件。这些文件使用了通过 2014 年《信息自由法案》请求收集的 SME 数据，并得出结论称，联邦政府通过 1033 计划向地方执法部门提供的 SME 减少了犯罪。在这里，我们表明由于数据存在问题，这些研究的结果不可信。我们使用关于 1033 SME 的更详细的审计数据，表明 2014 年的数据存在缺陷，而最近的数据没有提供证据表明 1033 SME 减少了犯罪。
