Warfighter → Crimefighter

Mapping the 1033 Program

During the summer of 2014, the “militarization of the police” was a widely discussed topic in the United States. The acronym “MRAP” (Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carrier) rumbled into the public lexicon as some Americans began to discuss why their local sheriff’s department or state police barracks might need such heavy-duty Materiel fresh off a foreign battlefield.

It takes a muckraker

When the New York Times open-sourced the raw data related to the 1033 Program, which is intended to facilitate the transfer of surplus military equipment from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement agencies in the US, I was motivated to explore the data and create something.

Most “Militarized” counties per Capita

Analyzing the data and making something useful with it was a delightful challenge. I ended up building a pretty nice data visualization featuring a normalized choropleth map of the cost of the gear per capita for every county in the United States, using awesome javascript libraries like d3.js and Leaflet, along with Node.js, MongoDB, and Socket.io and everything else that makes the internet go in 2014.

Do things and tell people

The final result was fairly well received by a tiny portion of the internet, and I was handsomely rewarded with some fruitful discussion and loads of magic internet points, which are probably my primary source of motivation*.

• besides money, the chance to leave the world a better place, and unbridled curiosity.