This repository analyzes the transfers made by the Defense Logistics Agency to local law enforcement since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 in support of a BuzzFeed News story, published on June 4, 2020. See below for details.
The DLA is a sub-agency of the Department of Defense; it provides equipment to local law enforcement agencies through its Law Enforcement Support Office. The program is commonly referred to as the "1033" program due to the statute that enabled it in 1997.
The data used in this analysis comes from the DLA's LESO Public Information page. The data/all.xlsx file contains all property transferred to participating agencies that was held by them as of March 31, 2020. It is updated quarterly.
The convert-data-to-csv.ipynb notebook takes the Excel file the DLA produces, reads each of the 52 sheets, and combines them into a single CSV with all the available data. The resulting CSV file is output to outputs/dla-1033-transfers.csv.
The analyze-transfers.ipynb takes the CSV data and analyzes all transfers where the Ship Date is after August 25, 2014, which marked the end of the first wave of protests in Ferguson. It walks through a few different pieces of analysis, including:
- Loading the data
- Filtering for transfers post August 25, 2014
- Totaling the transfers
- Highlighting categories of items mentioned in the story
All code in this repository is available under the MIT License. Files in the output/ directory are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
If you have any questions about this repository you can reach out to John Templon at [email protected].
Looking for more from BuzzFeed News? Click here for a list of our open-sourced projects, data, and code.