What the Uvalde situation really makes starkly clear is how the police militarization we’ve seen is a lot of hollow bellicose LARPing; bringing with it many of the disadvantages of having cops thinking and acting like an occupation force to whom the public is an enemy; but it’s not really militarization.
Basically any military has something between a ‘professional’ and an ‘existential’ interest in ensuring that its members will comply when told to do potentially lethally risky things(they generally encourage good tactical practice; because successes are more valuable than dead heroes; but whatever level of risk can’t be reduced is absolutely not supposed to block obedience to orders); and that its leadership at all levels won’t be paralyzed by the fact that sometimes their orders are going to get their people killed if that is what the situation demands. It would be a pretty abjectly broken army that couldn’t take over 350 armed personnel and tell them to go in after a single rifleman; even if breaching is dangerous.
Cops, we learn, love to wallow in the alleged peril of their situation; but absolutely don’t have that. You get all the adversarial asshole aspects that militaries can be tempted by; but you don’t actually get the internal discipline or risk tolerance.
