Last summer, as one city after another broke out in protest against the murder of George Floyd, some of the most enduring images were not of the demonstrators, but of the police: decked out in riot gear, aiming automatic weapons at peaceful crowds, and riding around on armored vehicles built for war.

The crackdowns on protesters renewed furious demands to end a suite of federal programs that have put billions of dollars worth of military weapons in the hands of local police. President Joe Biden singled out the most infamous of these the Pentagons 1033 program, which transfers weapons and equipment from Americas foreign wars directly to domestic law enforcement agencies for special condemnation. Surplus military equipment for law enforcement? They dont need that, Biden said last July. The last thing you need is an up-armored Humvee coming into the neighborhood.

But as calls to demilitarize the police have intensified, so has the belief in countless police departments that they need the tools and weapons of war to police Americas cities and towns.

Under a Freedom of Information Act request, HuffPost has exclusively obtained hundreds of letters that local law enforcement agencies wrote to the Department of Defense in 2017 and 2018 making the case to receive an armored vehicle under the 1033 program.

The documents reveal that hundreds of police departments across the country, in communities of all sizes, are willing to deploy armored vehicles to carry out even the most routine tasks: making traffic stops; serving search warrants; responding to domestic violence; responding to people threatening suicide.

In these requests, law enforcement officials predicted they would roll out these vehicles into their communities 10, 20, 40, 70, or more than 100 times a year, and in situations that are not automatically dangerous. The sheriff of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, went so far as to assert that a police officer could die serving a notice of a civil lawsuit and so his agency ought to have two armored vehicles.

Deputies and police officers die every day performing routine assignments, he wrote, echoing the you-never-know logic of hundreds of similar requests. It is always better to have protection and not need it than to have none while in need.

One department after another described broad criteria for using an armored vehicle that bordered on cavalier: whenever police are going somewhere they believe someone could have a gun, even legally; whenever a suspect could become violent.

The requests arent limited to a particular region or type of community, suggesting the sheer ubiquity of the militarized mindset inside ordinary police departments. Cities claimed they need armored vehicles because they police dense, urban areas, while rural towns claimed they need the vehicles because their population is spread out. Whatever the size and makeup of their community, agencies marshaled that as evidence of their need to be extremely well-armored.

The requests differed sharply from how police justify and defend the use of military-style weapons to the public. In public, law enforcement agencies tend to say that they will only break out armored vehicles in rare cases of extreme violence, such as mass shootings. With everything that we ask of local law enforcement, why would we ask them to have anything less than the best safety equipment available? asked Patrick Yoes, the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, in a recent interview.

In response to these requests, the Pentagon has provided thousands of small-town police and sheriff agencies with vehicles built to withstand conditions of war. The 1033 program has also distributed billions of dollars worth of helicopters, body armor, night vision equipment, ammunition, rifle sights, machine guns and assault rifles.

The most iconic piece of equipment is the MRAP, or mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, which was designed to protect American troops in Iraq from IED blasts. Once they roll onto American streets, police almost invariably use armored vehicles to transport SWAT teams to carry out drug-related search warrants and to crack down on people exercising their right to protest.

The major impact of using this military gear for everyday policing is on the lives of Black and brown people, said Carl Takei, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU.

Opponents of the 1033 program are becoming fearful that they will never rein it in. Despite his comments last summer, Biden has failed to seize multiple opportunities to reform the Pentagons 1033 program. The White House prepared an executive order to limit the program his very first week in office, but Biden never signed it. House Democrats have introduced multiple bills to limit or end the program and openly called on the president to take action on his own, but Biden has remained silent.

And Democrats sweeping proposals for police reform, which would significantly limit the 1033 program, have reportedly stalled, with rising crime rates making lawmakers wary of appearing at odds with the police. In late July, Punchbowl reported that bipartisan negotiations over police reform led by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) are on life support.

Theyre Ready For War

The 1,200-plus pages of documents HuffPost obtained expose the flimsy pretext that police will only use military gear in a genuine crisis and how explicitly many police acknowledge that their goal is to intimidate vulnerable members of their communities. The requests also reveal how thoroughly many police have learned to fear the public as potential combatants, how automatically they are able to perceive everyday situations as potentially lethal, and how fervently they believe that their fear justifies extreme countermeasures for everyday conflicts. A few times, police departments even referred to their officers as troops or to police shifts as tours of duty.

The letters also reflect a disturbing comfort with even an expectation of using military gear and tactics to respond to civil demonstrators. Multiple agencies explicitly asked for armored vehicles to use at protests against police violence toward Black people and pipeline resistance led by Native Americans.

Years before Floyds murder made Minneapolis the epicenter of nationwide protests, multiple agencies in Minnesota requested armored vehicles to use in the event of civil protest involving mass arrests. Other agencies around the country cited potential civil disturbances civil disorder civil unrest and crowd control as reasons they ought to have artillery-proof Humvees and mine-resistant trucks.

The sheriffs department in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, which participated in the heavily armed crackdown on people protesting the police shooting of Alton Sterling, cited those protests as one reason it needed three armored vehicles: a Humvee, an up-armored Humvee, and a six-wheeled MRAP. (Asked if using an armored vehicle to respond to a civil demonstration could erode community trust, a sheriff spokesperson said community trust is preserved when law enforcement shows it can keep the public safe.)