Police make lousy soldiers. Soldiers make lousy policemen. And a militarized police force is counterproductive regardless of whether you want to keep the peace or win a war:
There’s a telling scene related to all of this in Evan Wright’s terrific book Generation Kill. Wright was embedded with an elite U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. Throughout his time with the unit, Wright documents the extraordinary precautions the unit takes to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, and the real heartbreak the soldiers feel when they do inadvertently kill a civilian. About 3/4 through the book, Wright explains how the full-time Marines were getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their civilians lives were law enforcement, “from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals,” and were acting like idiot renegades. Wright quotes a gunnery sargeant who traveled with the reserve unit:
Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They’d roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop…He’s like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him ‘Napoleon.'”
The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who’d been helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi troops.
Yeah, there’s a group of idiots you want to arm and send out on nightly no-knock raids so they can bravely kill 92-year old women in their homes.
Anyhow, it’s good to see that these lying murderers are no longer “protecting and serving”.