Resolved: Demilitarization of the United States Police

Some of this is copied from another debate I did, on a separate topic that is applicable to this. The first part explains how military equipment and riot gear can actually influence riots to start. That's right, the militarization of police can and does cause riots to occur, and as people sworn to protect and serve the safety of the public, they should rarely if ever wear riot gear or have intimidating looking equipment around. When you try to intimidate rowdy crowds, they tend to look down on that and riot, hurting officers and civilians. Riot Wylted Pro Riot gear seems to effect crowd violence according to recent study by the UC Berkeley. When cops wear riot gear it signals to the crowd, that the police are ready for a fight. This comes from numerous observations on the Occupy movement and then watching these theories play out with the violence in Ferguson, while protests in LA were mild and also used less police in riot gear. Another problem is that riot gear comes with police lines and restricting the movement of protestors, which have been linked to increased aggression in groups. http://m.sfgate.com... What we're seeing is a lot of the actions of Law Enforcement actually causing these riots to occur in what would've otherwise been peaceful protests. I don't disputes that a police presence is necessary in these events, but showing up in riot gear is just going to lead to more riots, which actually causes more total people and property to be damaged. Now my opponent might point out that the risks to police are increased when they wear less riot gear, but when you see the decreased violence towards civilians and their property, you can see it's a fair trade off, especially when you consider how many women and children are spared from violence as a result of this. Police accept this job knowing they will face more risks than the general population, so this minimal risk is fair, and from a utilitarian point of view an incredibly good trade off. Paramilitary style uniforms Another problem police have is paramilitary style uniforms, if the police switched to pink uniforms in a blazer style, they'd be significantly better off. One study on police uniforms showed annincredible decrease in violence from and towards police in blazer style uniforms as opposed to the paramilitary uniforms meant to intimidate the average citizen. "In 1969, the police in Menlo Park, California dispensed with their traditional navy blue, paramilitary-style uniforms and adopted a nontraditional uniform in hopes of improving police community relations. The new, nontraditional uniform consisted of a forest green sport coat blazer worn over black slacks, a white shirt, and a black tie. The officer's badge was displayed on the blazer and the officer's weapons were concealed under the coat. Once word spread about Menlo Park's attempts, over 400 other police department in the United States also experimented with a blazer style uniform. After wearing the new uniforms for 18 months the Menlo Park police officers displayed fewer authoritarian characteristics on psychological tests when compared to officers in the surrounding jurisdictions. Also for that first one-and-one-half years with the new uniforms, assaults on the Menlo Park police decreased by 30% and injuries to civilians by the police dropped 50%." http://www.policeone.com... Also in the same article it explains that people in lighter clothes such as pink are perceived as being good and less aggressive. swat Swat teams originally were only supposed to be for really dangerous situations and only about 100 or so we're done every year. Now we have epidemics where gamers are literally prancing their opponents by sending the SWAT team to their house in a prank known as "swatting". The number of seats should at least be lowered to what they were at the height of the drug war in the 70s as opposed to the several thousand seats done yearly as of now. SWATs that routinely end up going into the wrong house and even killing innocent people in the confusion created by a SWAT. These military like units should undoubtedly be scaled back