= new reply since forum marked as read
I wish our police departments behaved more like MPs. They have very strict rules of engagement with the citizenry of foreign countries. Do not confuse them with special forces and tactical teams. Huge numbers folks aren't even all combat veterans (never seen a battlefield)!
In typical small town American law enforcement agencies, it's all about the dollar. The only way many of them increase their budgets is by targeting the same people they're supposed to protect. This creates incentives for more contact with Joe and Sue Public. As far as the weapons of war, well they've got to spend that money on something. If not, the money goes back into the city budget and their piece of the pie is smaller during the next fiscal year.
Just my opinion, not here to hand your head to you.
I am sorry it took so long to respond. Making dinner for the family! 
I believe our entire approach to policing needs changing. We need to have a clear idea of what crime is and we, as a society , need to decide what do we want our policing to be.
I will say, military MPs have much more clarity on their objectives and they are readily held accountable by their peers and superiors. The policy checks a good amount of the baked in biases and negative attitudes. Accountability and consequences, these are huge differences.
Some interesting conversations on the topic:
https://theconversation.com/why-the-us-military-usually-punishes-misconduct-but-police-often-close-ranks-127898
https://understated.home.blog/2020/06/21/a-better-militarization-why-police-should-adopt-military-cultures-and-structures-of-accountability-and-restraint/
From the article.....
If the problem is “militarization”, why do US military troops in the Philippines, postwar Germany, Japan, Korea and even Iraq screw up less and respond to screw-ups better than the police back home? The propensities for disaster certainly seem far broader. Language barriers, cultural gaps, lingering postwar hatreds and animosities exist in spades. A degree of hidden racism must undoubtedly exist as well, as a product of prolonged war. And yet, US soldiers think more before shooting children in countries where irregular plain-clothes child soldiers exist than US police do before gunning down unarmed black kids.
Clearly, the term “militarization” has become disconnected from any reasonable idea of military structures and ideas and has rather been appropriated to refer to intense arming. This possibly reflects a troubling cultural phenomenon across the world – the tendency to view the military and military success purely in the language of weaponry and lethality. More importantly, this gap in language provides cover for bad actors to strawman and obfuscate. Intensely armed police might need to more explicitly prove their ability to use weaponry with discipline on top of their need for such weapons, whilst “militarized” police might be supposed to already have such discipline and training, and thus only need to prove a need for military weapons.
I appreciate your post.
