Watching the Sheriff's Department marching, in formation, dressed in black, with ARs, behind an MRAP, is, well, disquieting.

With whom are they going to war, exactly?

Here in Toronto the other month, right across the street from my home, there was a man having a mental breakdown in a park swinging a handgun around, and they had five marksmen in range ready to take a shot if it got out of hand on the ground, and rifles on the ground to make sure it doesn't get too far out of hand.

Grenade launchers are fairly common equipment for a police force these days, there are a large number of crowd control and tactical (visibility flares, IR flares) devices which can be launched out of standard grenade launchers, since the military has brought down the cost of this equipment, police forces seem to standardize around it.

The border states having higher spending on weaponry and armour is intuitively understandable, given how hot the border is. Per-landmass and per-police-officer numbers might also be a more interesting stat to look at.

LA county makes regular use of their armoured vehicles, that I understand. So unless you're arguing that police officers in LA county should just let themselves get shot when people are shooting at them, I think it'd be hard to imagine it being a bad thing that they have armoured vehicles.

Explosive Ordinance Disposal vehicles (and other equipment, such as X-ray imaging devices, tracked robotic vehicles, projected water disruptors) make a lot of sense. The New York Police Department has had a bomb squad since 1903(!). If you love the idea of bomb technicians being shredded into mists of blood, flesh, and bone; or love going to funerals where there is no recovered corpse, then sure, their lives are not worth even a couple hundred k per capita, less than the average person in the general population in the U.S. government's estimation.

there is a 6.5mm round but its very specialized and not likely to be acquired by police forces

The link to your GitHub profile page in the footer of the article is broken: it points to 'https://github.com/https://github.com/vcolano'.

Cook County kinda sorta expected, but why Lake County? Waukegan really that bad?

EDIT: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Waukegan-Illinois.html not that bad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

Mind you, the other countries also don't have a population which has hysterically self-armed itself in the last 2-3 decades. When everyone carries a gun and the police are still expected to do their duty, they have to have superior firepower at the end of the day.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri

In addition to Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza, Italy has had "classic" military (infantrymen in camo, from the Italian Army, Paratroopers and Artillery regiments) patrolling the streets in two separate operations, one of which is active nowadays:

- Operation Sicilian Vespers, against the Mafia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sicilian_Vespers_(19...), ceased in 1998.

- Operation Safe Streets (strade sicure), against terrorism and generic crime. Still active (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operazione_Strade_sicure)

Of course the police needs their own tank, because, you know, terrorists. Boo!