When locals learned that the Johnson County, Iowa, sheriffs office had gotten hold of a massive, mine-resistant vehicle, Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek reassured a skeptical public that officers would primarily use it during extreme weather events in order to save residents from the states extraordinary blizzards or floods.

Essentially its really a rescue, recovery and transport vehicle, Pulkrabek said in 2014 .

But in the seven years since, the vehicle which comes from the Pentagons much-maligned 1033 Program that arms local law enforcement with weapons, gear and vehicles leftover from the countrys foreign wars has been used for almost anything but that.

Iowa City police, who share use of the vehicle with the sheriffs office, staged it near last years racial justice protests , where officers fired tear gas at peaceful protesters for refusing to disperse. And this May, residents fumed after police drove the former war machine through a predominantly Black neighborhood to serve arrest warrants.

The outrage spurred Iowa City council members this summer to demand that the county give the vehicle back to the Pentagon.

It is a vehicle made for wartime circumstances, and in my honest opinion, it doesnt belong here, city council member Janice Weiner told HuffPost.

The Johnson County Sheriffs Office isnt the only law enforcement agency to cite extraordinary weather as the reason it needs hardware from the military. Last year, Congress made a little-noticed tweak to the 1033 Program to give priority access for armored vehicles to police and sheriffs departments that claimed to need them for disaster-related emergencies, HuffPost has learned with few checks on how the vehicles are ultimately used.

In recent years, theres been an explosion in the number of police and sheriffs departments citing catastrophic storms, blizzards, and especially floods to justify why they ought to receive an armored vehicle.

HuffPost exclusively obtained hundreds of requests for armored vehicles that local agencies wrote to the Defense Department in 2017 and 2018. And in contrast to just a few years earlier, when almost no law enforcement agencies mentioned natural disasters, there were agencies from virtually every state pleading for help with disaster preparedness.

There are a few reasons for law enforcements shifting rhetoric. Across the country, climate change is fueling more destructive and deadlier catastrophes. The U.S. has not invested in large-scale disaster preparedness, forcing local governments and law enforcement to prepare for disasters and pay for it largely on their own.

But the bigger reason may be that the Defense Department has also started to cue local police and sheriffs to make a big deal out of their role in disaster response. Within the past few years, on the forms that police and sheriffs must submit to justify their requests for armored vehicles, the Pentagon began to list natural disasters as an example justification. (The 1033 Program was created in 1996.)

Local agencies eagerly seized on this logic. In the documents HuffPost obtained, a bevy of police and sheriffs departments along the Gulf Coast, from Florida to Georgia to Louisiana, mentioned a legendary hurricane season in their states, while New Jersey police departments recalled their total incapacitation after 2012s Superstorm Sandy.

Our resources were quickly overwhelmed and the inability to respond with adequate high water rescue vehicles severely hampered rescue operations, the chief of police of Lacey Township, a village in New Jerseys flood-prone Pine Barrens, wrote in a request for an up-armored Humvee in 2018. (Asked for comment, a deputy for the township said he had no memory of the request.)

Then, last year, Congress made the change to the 1033 Program that supercharged the incentives for linking climate disasters to military hardware. In its annual defense spending bill , Congress instructed the Pentagon to give the highest priority to applications that request vehicles used for disaster-related emergency preparedness, such as high-water rescue vehicles.

Disaster preparedness experts who spoke with HuffPost balked at the idea of flooding the country with even more military vehicles under the auspices of preparing for climate change.

Some noted that police are free to use military gear from the Pentagon however they want since no one is charged with making sure law enforcement agencies only use it for disaster response. Others pointed out that police really are responsible for safeguarding the public in the event of a climate catastrophe and military vehicles dont do much of anything to help police prepare for that role.

I can guarantee you that none of these police departments putting climate or extreme weather down have emergency management plans to use it [that way], said Leigh Anderson, a Chicago State University researcher and auditor who oversees police departments in Illinois and Missouri.