There was a $300 popcorn machine, two riding lawn mowers valued at more than $6,000 each, a $115,000 cargo truck, and a $7,000 "personal/home use" television.
A small Sussex County police department has received more shipments of "military" equipment than any other Delaware law enforcement agency since 2017, when President Donald Trump removed restrictions on the controversial federal-to-state procurement program.
In the subsequent years, seven Delaware police departments received 140 separate shipments of equipment from branches of the armed services, valued at more than $710,000, according to a federal database obtained by the USA Today Network.
Of those, Laurel's 18-officer police department took in 128 shipments. In many cases, the $350,000-worth of items received didn't fit into categories of equipment generally regarded as military issue.
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There was the nearly-$6,000 electric vacuum cleaner received in January, the $7,000 Segway that arrived in October, as well as a $15,000 forklift and a $5,000 pressure washer.
Laurel police also received six trucks or tractors valued at more than $255,000, an amount that includes the $115,000 cargo truck.
Officials at the Laurel department were not available Monday to comment for this story.
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Administered by the Defense Logistics Agency, the military surplus 1033 program has allowed state and local police to collect military equipment, deemed obsolete or excess, since the 1990s. The departments must pay for the price of shipping and any storage fees.
The program became controversial in 2014 when law enforcement brought military vehicles to protests of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The controversy recently re-erupted across the nation amid protests of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
President Barack Obama reigned in the program in 2015 by prohibiting transfers to police of weaponized vehicles and aircraft, and banning items such as grenade launchers, bayonets and high-caliber firearms.
More: Protests against police put $454 million in military gear under spotlight
More: Dewey Beach to auction controversial military equipment — and much more — next month
Trump reversed the decision in 2017, and since then local law enforcement agencies nationwide have obtained nearly half-a-billion dollars of surplus military equipment.
Last year, the small community of Dewey Beach auctioned off equipment it had received from the military, among other items
Second to Laurel in the reception of military equipment in Delaware in recent years is the New Castle County Police Department.
The agency, which patrols of a majority of the county and its 558,000 people, in 2017 received two bomb-defusing robots valued at $77,000 each.
Like Laurel, other local Delaware departments that received equipment through the federal program in recent years are in the state's southern areas, including police in Delmar, Harrington, Camden and Frederica.
Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.
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