Real Military Police

I'm not talking about the military police force itself.  I'm talking about our local police forces.  Since 9/11 the federal government has been giving grants to local police departments to help them fight terrorism.  Several of these grants have resulted in arming the local police as though they were serving in Afghanistan.  The ACLU has embarked on a campaign to determine just how well armed our police have become.  The campaign tag line is "Towns Don't Need Tanks".  Here are some examples from the ACLU site.

• Confused after throwing a deafening and blinding “flashbang” into a home, police mistakenly shot and killed a sleeping nine-year-old.
• A county sheriff’s department in South Carolina has an armored personnel carrier dubbed "The Peacemaker," which can shoot weapons that the U.S. military specifically refrains from using on people.
• New Hampshire police received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, asking “what red-blooded American cop isn’t going to be excited about getting a toy like this?”
• Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million Predator drone from Homeland Security to arrest a family who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.
• Police in Arkansas announced plans to patrol streets wearing full SWAT gear and carrying AR-15 assault rifles.
• Drone manufacturers may offer police remote controlled drones with weapons like rubber bullets, Tasers, and tear gas.
• Two SWAT Teams shut down a neighborhood in Colorado for four hours to search for a man suspected of stealing a bicycle and merchandise from Wal-Mart.
• A company in Arizona submitted a patent for shock cuffs, which can be used by cops to remotely administer a Taser-like shock to detainees.
• An Arizona SWAT team defended shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, but had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.
• The New York City Police Department disclosed that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy Movement protesters.