Here is another critical aspect of this to understand. When the city hall bean counters ask the chief of police why they are spending millions on a SWAT team that was only used 20 times last year, what will happen next year?
The SWAT team will be used 200 times next year, even with no increase in actual crime. They will shoot cats out of trees. Anything to justify the continued large budget. It’s a feedback loop.
Why did this ever develop in the the first place? My sense of things is that there is a trajectory we have been on for decades (at least) leading to exactly the loss of American Constitutional government.
The question remains, how, or why, did we start along this trajectory? I suggest it is a tendency in evidence by things like Colonel House’s “Edmund Drew” at a very early date. Maybe even earlier, but not so thought out as a developed worldview.