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>>miles+(OP)
I don’t think the police need MRAPs. That’s a bit over the top. However, it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting. SWAT maybe has some use for military equipment, but only for bona-fide SWAT situations (hostages/bombs/active shooter.) But rolling out MRAPs for general policing is a bad policy. It’s one step removed from deploying tanks and it’s a bad look and probably counterproductive.

>>briand+Ra
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement.

Of course the police union lobbied for more.

They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They have closed circuit cameras at every major intersection. They have Stingrays. They have purchased LRADs which can permanently deafen. They have helicopters, tear gas cannons for hundreds of officers, batons.

And they trot it out for peaceful protests. The police did not come equipped to protect, they came equipped to escalate and occupy.

Hell, they even manage to bust a lot of the equipment out at concerts and festivals. I stopped going to a local outdoor concert series when they decided to gate a park off and start pat downs and metal detecting everyone who entered.

>>dashun+9e
> But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had.

What always confuses me (I live in a country where the police don't generally get guns, even) is what they're preparing for with this sort of thing? A full-on war? Like, if they need hundreds of assault rifles for police work, then arguably society has already collapsed and the police are probably surplus to requirements anyway.

>>rsynno+9p
I think the term "assault rifle" is very misleading here. People are imagining fully automatic weapons like the ones the military uses. But outside of SWAT, such weaponry is very rare. (And in most countries, their equivalent of SWAT has fully automatic weapons.)

The rifles used by everyday police are the same as those owned by tens of millions of civilians. These weapons are cosmetically similar to those used by the military, but they have the same functionality and fire the same cartridge as the Ruger Mini-14.[1] They are semi-automatic. Every "bang!" requires a pull of the trigger. The reasons police have these weapons are because pistols are less accurate, have shorter range, and are unable to penetrate body armor. These rifles are usually locked in the back of the vehicle and only brought out for standoff situations, or if the cop has retreated due to being outgunned. Such occasions are rare, but when they happen, those rifles are worth their weight in gold (as are the fire extinguishers and medical kits in practically all police cars).

Moreover, police have always used the latest weaponry. A century ago, they were equipped with the Thompson submachine gun[2] and the Browning Automatic Rifle[3] (both of which are fully automatic weapons).

I agree that police have gotten more militarized over time, and I would love to roll that back, but it's also true that many of those arguing in this thread are either misled or disingenuous. We're much more likely to convince others if we make sure our arguments and our facts are unimpeachable.

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruger_Mini-14.jpg

2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thompsonad1sm.jpg

3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Firearms_practice,_1...