YEP. Police militarization gave us Uvalde.
But in our ill-conceived attempt to refashion police into a cadet branch of the military, we have somehow managed to get the worst of both worlds. We have trained a generation of officers that being casually brutal in everyday encounters is acceptable, but these same officers show a disturbing tendency to fall back on jargon about “battlespace management” and “encounter tempo” to explain a slow reaction in the rare circumstance that really does require a rapid, all-out response. Especially in poor communities, the result has been the strange dynamic of “over-policing and under-protection” described by the criminologist David Kennedy, in which police are hypervigilant about petty offenses but unresponsive to more serious criminal activity.
Police militarization, it turns out, is largely swagger, and short on substance.
Police make lousy soldiers and soldiers make lousy police. Though in truth, the U.S. military deals more sensitively with conquered populations than most urban police deal with the people they protect and serve.