What the Pentagon sent New Jersey police

The Defense Department gives surplus military equipment to American police departments. The program is called 1033, after the section of the 1990 defence authorisation act that created it, and the Defense Logistics Agency publishes what went where.

For New Jersey the public record runs from November 1993 to June 2026 and covers 179 agencies, 1,923 line items and $40.7 million in equipment measured at what the Pentagon originally paid for it.^[1]

Three things about that figure before anything else. It is acquisition cost, not present worth, so a truck bought in 1994 is counted at its 1994 price. It records what an agency received over time, not what it currently holds. And receiving surplus equipment is not misconduct. This is a record of a federal program operating as designed.

What was sent

Two categories account for more than half the value: armoured vehicles and military trucks, together $23.7 million of the $40.7 million total.

The weapons line is the one most likely to be misread. At 4,628 items it is by far the largest category by count and one of the smallest by value, because surplus rifles are individually cheap. A count and a dollar figure tell opposite stories here, and either alone is misleading.

The MRAPs

Nineteen mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles have gone to New Jersey law enforcement agencies. These are vehicles built for Iraq and Afghanistan, designed to survive buried explosives, weighing on the order of fifteen tonnes.

They are also, at $12.6 million of original cost, the single largest line in New Jersey's 1033 record. An MRAP is the piece of equipment that most sharply raises the question the program has always raised: what a police department is equipped for, and what that equipment implies about how it expects to be used.

This site records where they went and says nothing further about it, because the record supports the first and not the second. An agency that holds an MRAP and has never deployed it and an agency that deploys one routinely appear identically in this data.

Concentration

The equipment is not spread evenly. The five agencies with the largest tactical holdings by value have received between $1.2 million and $1.6 million each: Perth Amboy, North Bergen, East Brunswick Township, Middletown and Orange.

Item counts and values pull apart here too. North Bergen reached $1.58 million across 9 line items, while Orange reached $1.23 million across 51. One agency took a small number of expensive things and the other took many cheaper ones, and any ranking that uses only one of those numbers will order them wrongly.

179 agencies appear in the record at all, out of 548 in this site's data. The majority of New Jersey law enforcement agencies have never received 1033 equipment, or received it before the published record begins.

Why this sits alongside discipline data

This site's main subject is police discipline, and 1033 transfers are not discipline. They appear here because they are part of the same question a resident is usually asking: what is my police department, and what does the public record say about it.

The site draws no causal link between the two datasets, and there is none in the data to draw. An agency with an armoured vehicle is not thereby an agency with more complaints, and nothing here should be read as suggesting it. The transfers are on the department pages as a labelled layer with their own source and their own caveats, next to but separate from the complaint record.

The quantity trap

One methodological note, because it affects how any 1033 analysis should be read.

The records count quantity within a unit of issue, and the units are not comparable. One line item might be 1 vehicle. Another might be 1 kit containing many parts. Another might be 500 rounds. Summing raw quantities across a whole agency produces a number with no meaning, and published 1033 analyses that lead with a large item count are frequently summing across incompatible units.

This site aggregates quantities only within a unit of issue and leads with value rather than count. That is why the tables above pair the two: the value column is comparable across categories and the quantity column is not.

The full per-agency transfer records, with ship dates, item names and original values, are in the published data mirror.