[djaque]

> There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

- Commander Adama

[vsareto]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24745471

I'm starting to think it was more than just sitcoms

[farseer]

The American population is heavily armed so that comparison is not valid. You need police to be well equipped to handle a 300lb man in body armour and fielding an AR-15 style rifle.

[tertiary]

That's not true in the 80% use case of SWAT teams which is drug offenses and executing search warrants. This is the core argument for demilitarization, not the straw man of "I don't want police to have the equipment needed to respond to school shooters." Showing up with militarized teams to mostly non-violent situations just causes escalation after escalation and is why militarized units kill at a far higher rate than just the police alone.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

[craftinator]

> You need police to be well equipped

No; no I don't. I need police to be better equipped upstairs, maybe take some queues from the British or German police.

A slim portion of the American population is heavily armed, and police don't deal with armed suspects in something like 99% percent of 911 calls. In that <1% of cases, we can call SWAT. That's why SWAT exists, to be a highly trained, militarized version of the police.

[nkozyra]

I think this is begging the question a bit.

We assume a lot of inevitables in this case, specifically that an interaction with law enforcement will likely end in conflict

[oneplane]

So your solution is to just keep escalating?

[rhino369]

See the North Hollywood Shootout for a good example of what happens if the cops are outgunned.