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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

How did we get here? When gangs and organized crime turned the cities into war zones in the 1970's and 1980's.

Actually the militarization of the police force comes from a coordinated effort to repurpose military hardware for domestic police use. [1]

Kind of funny that the gear used to fight one terrible war overseas is sent back to our own country and used to fight another terrible war domestically, huh?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipme...

That's a relatively recent phenomenon that comes at the tail end of something that has been happening for many decades now.

The existence of drug organizations is a capitalist response to government intervention in the market. Prohibition is the source of the black drugs market as well as the reason the police militarized themselves.

It is impossible to outlaw drugs. Attempting to do so merely increases the price by increasing the risk, resulting in unending escalatio.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalizati...

Then why did the practice only catch on and spread like wild-fire after crime had already begun its plunge?

And why, after crime has continued to drop dramatically, has SWAT-ification continued to increase (if not accelerated) rather than plateau or even drop in response?

Once you've built up an organization like that, it's hard to demobilize it. Public unions basically make it impossible to shrink police forces.

Blaming unions would probably have worked better, back before the banking crisis forced many communities to do exactly what you suggest can't be done.

That said, you do raise a good point that it's career-suicide to advocate reducing police budgets in the US unless absolutely necessary -- and even then it isn't ever well-received.

(Which makes the (in)ability to actually reduce staffing a secondary problem, at best.)

But none of that excuses continued growth in the face of plunging crime, let alone the acceleration in use of such tactics.

When EPA and Department of Agriculture have their own SWAT teams, you know that SWAT teams are more for status display between high level bureaucrats than for any real need to fight off the nefarious activities of Dr Evil.

Which could not have had anything to do with the actions of the state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs

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