...wolverines, man.
I've known a couple of great men that were peace officers, but they treated the job as just that, ensuring the peace. Men who were willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of strangers because that's the job they signed up for, and they realized that living off of tax revenue came with the duty to be responsible to the folks that those taxes were taken from. They weren't in the uniform to generate revenue for dirty local politics, train like SEAL team 6, or view anyone without a badge as a different class of individual than they.
The militarization of the police is something I think the founders of the country would condemn, but given the arguably impossible task of fighting the drug war, it's not hard to see why the police would feel it necessary to engage in an arms and tactics race with cartels and gangs. An interesting side benefit for both the cartels and the police is that they get fantastically larger amounts of money. The downside for us common folk is a police force that's armed to the teeth, the youngest of which seem to take the job terribly seriously, and well-armed criminals who view our cities and neighborhoods like a war zone.
What's the (mostly)peaceful individual to do? I shrug and complain and hope that I can get my family somewhere where there's some liberty left in the event that things go crazy.
That and try to ignore the silent black choppers that follow me everywhere.
