The worst part about the police getting military gear is that the actual military has much stricter rules of engagement. With great power comes great responsibility.
I hang out a lot with a lot of former US infantry guys on discord, and they talk all the time about how rule one was come back alive, and rule two was 'make sure you all get your stories straight.' This mythos of the American warfighter being above and beyond is propaganda. Good propaganda, because it has some basis in truth, but it whitewashes a lot of nastiness.
The people I feel worst for are the soldiers themselves. You're informed over and over about the rules of engagement, and when you get there none of it applies.
If you don't shoot first, then your next to you friend will die. Obviously you're going to break the rules in that situation, it's what any human would do.
Now you have to live the rest of your life, knowing you broke conventions. You should be tried like the war-criminal you are. Or so it feels.
While I disagreed with the west's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have the utmost respect for the soldiers who fought there. They deserve a set of rules can realistically be followed.
It’s frustrating and sad, like stories about this tend to be.
For anyone who hasn't read it, this is a similar, excellent article in the New Yorker on an ex-CIA officer's experience working as a beat cop on the streets of Atlanta. It dovetails magnificently with the ProPublica piece.
The Spy Who Came Home: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-ca...
I believe that the following three paragraph-long quotes serve as a sufficient tl;dr:
"According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out."
"At Georgia’s state police-training facilities, the focus is “all tactics and law,” Skinner told me. Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed—and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs."
"“This is how situations go so, so badly—yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”"
The standard for police in the USA is appallingly low, and getting lower.