Clearly, the answer is that police departments are filling roles they do not need to fill, and have expensive, military style equipment they do not need to have. I hope we see more cities bringing these ideas to the table.
The former [1].
>1033 receipts are associated with both an increase in the number of observed police killings in a given year as well as the change in the number of police killings from year to year, controlling for a battery of possible confounding variables including county wealth, racial makeup, civilian drug use, and violent crime.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/militarization-makes-police-more-v...