No, people are no worse than they ever were. You could be accused at looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, you know. Drugs and violence are no more acceptable now than they were during prohibition. The culture of our nation has changed, of course, because it is always changing. If you want to send the Mexicans back to Mexico and the nice people from Peru back to the mountains where then came from, then you might want to think about sending the Italians back to Italy, the Greeks back to Greece, and the Irish back to Ireland. But I think we ought to keep the Germans.
I'm not sure and it may be only a liberal media thing but I read somewhere there used to be gangs even before WWII.
I also don't think the equipment itself matters so much. The police department in my hometown had a couple of submachine guns. I knew that because the tiny police department (this is in a town of under 10,000) had a garage type front, just like the fire department in the same building, and in the summer the opened the door and the gun cabinet was in plain view. But the policemen wore white shirts.
If a policeman wears combat gear, his attitude may be affected in a bad way. Using expressions like "war on" anything says that someone thinks there's a war on and the police are the soldiers. We might be the enemy. Lord knows where they get people who become policemen.
There might be a tendency to want to justify SWAT teams and the like by actually using them whenever possible, although one reads things (here) about them not being used when they should be. Can't win.
I mentioned in the related thread that I brought up the subject when I was in college around 1970 but the militarization of the police is much, much older than that. If you think about it, American state police forces have always be very militarized. The uniforms and haircuts have been very much more militaristic than "ordinary" policemen and they even have barracks. In other countries there are often a highly militarized or para-military police force, usually at a national level, but it never follows that they have been considered instruments of repression or anything like that. That can easily change, of course, when government itself becomes repressive. But don't blame government. Blame that part of the population that supports it. Don't kid yourself that dictatorships have no support from the people. But to end on a positive note, organizations like the RCMP and the Carabinieri are sources of national pride in those countries and yet are genuine para-military organizations.
