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.
that sounds like another untruth, unless that parking lot was underground and no one was allowed to park there how could they not miss this hunk of 5,000 pounds of metal on wheels larger than anything else in view.
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.
small parts for who neighborhood parts store? your tax dollars being misused.
