One freezing day last December in the tiny town of Palestine, Ark., a young man climbed into the police department’s Humvee, turned it on, and drove off on a joy ride.
“It never crossed my mind” that anyone would do that, Palestine Police Chief Stanley Barnes said Wednesday of the incident. The Humvee, which the town of fewer than 700 people got for free through a controversial Pentagon program that gives old military equipment to local police departments, doesn’t have keys. But it’s easy to look up how to start one.
The possibility that the 5,000-pound Humvee might be stolen was so far from Barnes’ mind that it took a week before anyone on the small force noticed it was missing from the police station’s parking lot.
Once Barnes noticed it was gone, he sprang into action.
“We just do what police officers do — we find out who done it,” Barnes said. “People talk.”
A hunter reported seeing the vehicle, which was emblazoned with the police department’s logo, in the woods a county over. The thief had driven into a tree and completely wrecked it. Barnes sent a truck over to pick up the Humvee and tow it back to the station.
The police department now uses the massive wreck for parts for its other Humvee, which it also obtained from the Department of Defense Excess Property Program (DOD 1033) to help fight crime in the small town.
As odd as it may seem that a hulking armored personnel carrier could go missing from a police department, it’s not that uncommon an occurrence.
In fact, at least three other police stations have misplaced or been robbed of their government-issued Humvees in the past five years. Weapons turn up missing, too. Yahoo News found that local police departments like Palestine's have been suspended from the Pentagon 1033 program for misplacing at least 14 M16 assault rifles, 11 M14 assault rifles, 21 pistols and 10 shotguns. These figures don’t come close to representing the total number of weapons that have been stolen or lost over the life of the program, however — a figure the Defense Department has not released.
