NY Times releases military surplus gear data on GitHub • Hacker News Board

amcnett wrote: post #14

I was surprised to see a number of mine-resistant vehicles associated with very rural counties in Washington State. Not being completely sure whether a mine-resistant vehicle was a tank or not, I googled the term and came across this article: http://news.yahoo.com/as-wars-wind-down--small-town-cops-inh... Choice quote from the article: “Here’s the thing,” Shellmyer says. “Washington, Iowa, has 8,000 people. We have a…

I live in Puyallup, Washington and we've received (what I believe to be) an MRAP. (It looks like one, but I've yet to see it outside of the building so I haven't gotten a very good look at it.) It's housed in the police/fire station downtown.

Puyallup is a "city" of just under 40,000. Our crime isn't even too horrible (http://www.piercecountycrimedata.org/NeighborhoodCrime/index...)

But we have an MRAP. It might be Pierce County's MRAP, housed in our building, but even then compared to the rest of Washington state, Pierce County is pretty tame.

Although, we do rank #9 in the U.S. for meth labs. So there's that. http://www.kplu.org/post/pierce-county-among-top-10-us-numbe...

Re: NY Times releases military surplus gear data on GitHub

#30

Post by imacomputer2 » Tue, Aug 19, 2014, 9:05 PM UTC

zrail wrote: post #2

This is awesome. Not really sure why they chose to release it as an XLSX document on GitHub, but it'll work!

Maybe they are hoping that it will attract more attention from hackers who might do something cool with the data. I'd like to make an app that plots all of the purchases on a map, or finds all the military gear ordered near you. But I don't have the time.