I agree with all of this, but I'm not the biggest fan of the way it gets framed. There are reasons for this beyond the common Internet sentiment that police are just evil bullies who became police solely so they can bully people. There was a shootout broadcast on live television in 1997 in North Hollywood between heavily armed and armored bank robbers and police, nearly an entire precinct and a SWAT team, in which the two robbers held out for nearly an hour in a parking lot, mostly because they so severely outgunned the police. They fired over 2000 rounds in the span of scarcely 20 minutes. It became pretty famous for being so similar to what happend in the movie Heat. This was only five years after the LA Riots, in which 63 people were murdered and the National Guard had to occupy the City of Los Angeles because the police couldn't handle the mayhem. Combining all the various criminal escalation of the 80s and 90s, major city police kind of started vowing that they might fail for other reasons, but they weren't going to fail simply because they were being outgunned by the criminals. This wasn't just police doing it of their own accord, either. Thanks to all of these events being televised and terrifying people, plenty of ordinary citizens and talking heads demanded the police do something. This wasn't like the American of today, when protesters block a street or throw a brick through a window and crazies of the Internet start talking about running them over with trucks and accusing them of rioting. These were real riots, with completely innocent people being pulled out of their cars in broad daylight and getting beaten to death with bricks on live television.

Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade.

As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard.

These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.