Not anymore, post 9/11, congress will pass the yearly defense budget bill which includes sales of excess military hardware to police forces. To get the hardware your police have to meet specific operating requirements.

Yeah it’s hyper-localized in the cities. There are 1,900 law enforcement agencies in Texas, 87 of them in the Houston area alone.

Here’s a list of the law enforcement agencies in the Houston Area: https://hapca.org/Member%20Agencies/member-agencies

They get as local as a department for just 150-300 acres of Brazosport College / Rice University or the Tiki Island Police Department covering a village of 1,100 people, despite being just a 5-minute drive to Galveston (a city of 53,000 people)

I don’t think the problem is local vs national police. Either way the national culture can be poor overall (as it is now) and each local area can have widely different quality (as they do now)