All well and good...except the days of waiting around for SWAT to show up..particularly in areas without full time on duty SWAT teams, are over. If you had kids in a school, with an active shooter...actively shooting children, would you want the “regular officers” to sit around on their ass? How many people can be killed waiting a half hour for the SWAT team to be called in, assembled, and make an entry? Maybe the entire school. The lesson from Columbine was just that...and departments are sued for a lack of or slow response to these situations. So the acquisition and training with this equipment is actually a good thing. That being said, how it is utilized can be bone headed at times...this I admit. Again...my two cents worth
The problem is that, once the department has the equipment, they go looking for reasons to use it. The reason doesn’t matter; could be trying to justify the purchase, could be just the temptation to play with the cool toys. The end result is the same: cops wearing full assault gear to serve summonses, respond to domestic calls, barking dogs etc. And, to make it worse, as I noted earlier the gear carries a mental attitude with it. Once suited up, the wearer goes into “operator” mode, and everything becomes a “tactical” operation instead of a normal call-out.
I believe some of this stems from the misguided policy of “officer safety”. Police are by definition meant to step in harms way to protect civilians. The civilians’ safety should *always* be paramount, even if it means the officer is injured. That’s where the “innocent until proven guilty” part comes in; every “suspect” has to be treated as innocent. Yes, more officers will likely be injured; fine, use all the money currently being spent on over-equipping the department, and use it to take care of the personnel instead.