After reading these two two articles at Reason Online about the increasing use of SWAT officers against people in petty drug raids, I have been thinking about the violent extremism that has crept up in the "law-and-order" camp among conservatives. There can be no denying that there are very few circumstances where "military tactics" need to be used against people suspected of a crime, but many social conservatives see nothing wrong with the role that SWAT now plays in many routine operations. At 40,000 or more deployments a year now, that's an average of about 110 SWAT deployments per day. Such a rate is unconsciable for a first world country.

If these deployments were carried out consistently with the utmost professionalism as exemplified by our armed forces, there wouldn't be any problem, but all too often SWAT units seem to exhibit boredom with such mundane military tactics as reconnaissance. Stories like this, where SWAT units did not actually conduct surveillance of the property before the raid to actually verify that it was the right location, are all too common. Yet social conservatives tend to have no problem with SWAT units over this, always dismissing this as "human error" or "a case of bad apples" as though the tactics themselves are not to blame for the problems.

See, here's the thing. Military tactics don't exist to keep the peace. They exist, and are refined, to kill people, break things and completely, unconditionally subordinate a people to a state. Infantry aren't trained to break up fights, they're trained to so efficiently and lethally unleash death and destruction that a foreign nation will submit to the United States. It doesn't take a genius to see that mixing soldiering and police work will create a middle ground who will lack the clear-cut mission and enemy that the soldier has and the professional requirement of the traditional police officer to use the least force necessary to subdue a law-breaker.