Having served in both, I can tell you that police aren’t the military. The intensity of the training, the resources put into developing unit cohesion, the careful cultivation of competent junior officers, the physical demands, the singular focus on obedience—military training is not simply “tougher” (in some ways) than police training; it is different in kind. This reflects the differing purpose and goals of the two institutions. That’s good; we shouldn’t want police to treat Americans like the military treats America’s enemies, and we shouldn’t train them to do so.

But in our ill-conceived attempt to refashion police into a cadet branch of the military, we have somehow managed to get the worst of both worlds. We have trained a generation of officers that being casually brutal in everyday encounters is acceptable, but these same officers show a disturbing tendency to fall back on jargon about “battlespace management” and “encounter tempo” to explain a slow reaction in the rare circumstance that really does require a rapid, all-out response. Especially in poor communities, the result has been the strange dynamic of “over-policing and under-protection” described by the criminologist David Kennedy, in which police are hypervigilant about petty offenses but unresponsive to more serious criminal activity.

Police militarization, it turns out, is largely swagger, and short on substance. What strikes me as I study the Facebook photo of the Uvalde SWAT team, standing in their tactical gear, is the theatricality of the whole thing. Any thoughtful observer of policing over the past 20 years has come to recognize the increasing childishness of the rhetoric about police militarization generally, and SWAT specifically. The journalist Radley Balko and others have documented police units’ use of military insignia and tough-guy mottos totally unsuited to civilian agencies (examples: “Hunter of men,” “We get up early, to BEAT the crowds,” “Baby Daddy Removal Team,” and “Narcotics: You huff and you puff and we’ll blow your door down”). Police education and training standards are abysmally low. In Texas, more training hours are required to be a hairdresser than a cop. National standards for SWAT training and tactics are essentially nonexistent.