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adamsea

Yeah this is terrible. Cops no longer look like cops, the way cops look is like soldiers. Soldier-cops.

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Without any of the training, discipline or legal responsibility actual soldiers have.

With looser rules of engagement than I had (USMC) in Afghanistan.

Bout to say the same thing. It's mind blowing how little restriction there is for them.

Good point : ).

I'm surprised this is downvoted.

Cops have been militarized pretty heavily, in the US

This is not the case. Where I live and across the US, cops are wearing the same uniform they've been wearing for 40 years, driving the same cars they have for 40 years, and are armed with the same guns they've been wielding for 40 years. I haven't seen a single cop dressed like a marine in my entire life.

I think you may be thinking of SWAT teams, but those teams are only deployed in situations like bank robberies, hostage situations, school shootings, etc and they do not regularly patrol, do proactive surveillance.

You must be living in Brigadoon or you live in a jurisdiction driving very old cop cars. Ford hasn't made the police Crown Vic in almost a decade, every force in metro Chicago now drives around in midsize SUVs. I don't see military style uniforms anywhere, but the Taser is now standard equipment in most departments so cops all sport those along with their service weapon.

My municipality got M16s from this Pentagon program some years ago, and at least some of the officers were actually pissed because it replaced the shotgun they used to carry and which was actually useful because it could load breaching shells to blow open doors, which was its most common use.

I live in Anne Arundel county MD, an hour outside DC. I’ve never seen police with military gear around here. They drive Ford explorers, but otherwise have a standard uniform and a sidearm.

ah yes, the Taser, a famous weapon of war

I see police in military uniforms in downtown Chicago all the time.

Got pulled over by a cop wearing an upside down “thin blue line” flag in Willow Springs. He was wearing a plate carrier and rocking an m4 for the traffic stop in the forest preserve.

Oh, that's a thing I've noticed a lot lately in Cook County --- squad SUVs with the silhouette of a tactical rifle behind the front cabin. I think they might be standard issue now?

By military uniforms, I mean, like, fatigues? Drab green, no colors. CPD insignia.

> but those teams are only deployed in situations like bank robberies, hostage situations, school shootings, etc

That's not true and is the reason people are upset. Nobody disagrees with the use of SWAT teams for school shooting and the like. However, that isn't how militarized units are used in real life. There simply isn't enough violent crime in most areas to justify a full time force dedicated to it. Instead, SWAT is used to target drug offenses (often times w/o an indication that there will be violence). In fact, the federal 1033 program (which funnels military hardware to the police) was founded to help fight the war on drugs.

The other big use of SWAT is for search warrants where they have replaced patrol officers in 80% of cases, the vast majority of which don't involve any suspicion that things will get violent.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/new-documents-r...

Forty years ago, body armor wasn’t ubiquitous and most cops still carried .38 revolvers.

Today, vests and semi autos are by far the norm.

I've never seen a cop walk around with a semi auto.

Literally every modern pistol, including Glocks are semi-automatic.

a Glock is militarization? A glock is not militarization. By semi auto I understood they meant a military style semi automatic rifle because of the context of the conversation. Police may carry these in their trunk, but I've never seen them carrying one around.

I never said a Glock is militarization - I was directly refuting your assertion that (among other things) that officers’ uniforms and the guns they carry hadn’t changed in forty years.

awfully pedantic to see going from a revolver to a glock as a slam dunk.

Police rarely use revolvers these days for numerous reasons (e.g., safety, training difficulty, efficacy, and so on).

"NBC 5 checked with more than 114 police departments in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Out of 79 responses, it was discovered only one Plano officer still carried a revolver."

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/last-revolvers-retired-as-...

I've never seen a cop in the US without a semi auto handgun.

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