CNN "Newsroom" - Transcript: Police Militarization

Interview

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COSTELLO: Doraville, Georgia, by the way, covers just three squares miles and incidentally a lawmaker from Georgia has been working on a bill to rein in police militarization for months long before Michael Brown's shooting and ensuing civil unrest in Ferguson. That man, Congressman Hank Johnson, joins me now from Atlanta.

Welcome, sir.

REP. HANK JOHNSON (D), GEORGIA: Thank you for having me.

COSTELLO: I notice you weren't laughing at John Oliver's bit on Doraville.

JOHNSON: Well, no, it's the kind of display that, when you're trying to run a police department policing an urban area, do you show up in garb that makes you look like you're ready to go into combat on the streets of Iraq? That's unacceptable.

COSTELLO: Your bill, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, what exactly would it do?

JOHNSON: Well, what it would do is to stop a Pentagon program that transfers surplus military equipment straight from the battlefield to the local law enforcement agency that requests it. And all that agency has to do is to fill out a one page application and request form. And so long as they can go and pick the equipment, be it an armed drone or an armored vehicle or a silencer for a pistol, the only thing they need to do is pick it up within 14 days and it's theirs, no training, no understanding of best practices in terms of when and where and how to use the equipment, and also no accountability. So my legislation would stop this practice of transferring directly from the DOD to a law enforcement agency bypassing the --

COSTELLO: And you also say, sir -- you also say, sir, that there's an underlying issue here. In fact, I think that you wrote an article and you said, "By passing off still good equipment to America's municipal police forces, it allows the defense industry to ask for more funding for more equipment."

You say it's like donating a relatively new sweater to Goodwill to allow the purchase of a new yet unnecessary sweater from Macy's. Explain.

JOHNSON: Well, we live in a world where armed conflict abroad involving our troops is something that is definitely foreseeable, so we may need this very equipment that we're transferring away from the DOD to local law enforcement. We may need it for our troops, and if we don't have it, we have to remanufacture it, which costs more money, and it's got a cost factor about it, this 1033 program. We need look seriously at it.

COSTELLO: And I think the Defense Department is, so we'll see what happens. Georgia State Congressman Hank Johnson, thank you so much for joining me.

JOHNSON: Thank you.

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