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The Use Of Military Weapons And Tactics Essay

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Oddly enough though, the use of military weapons and tactics found their way into law enforcement around the time Andy and Barney were seen on the aforementioned television program. The mid-1960s saw a transition from a reliance on the US military for those issues that popped up on home soil, to an abridgment of militarized police forces (Katel, 2014). Instead of needing approval from the government and a resulting movement of troops, law enforcement agencies could begin to use their very own ‘military-style’ force if the need ever arose in their area. As Katel describes in his CQ Research document on police tactics, events like the University of Texas clock tower sniper were just enough to push agencies in the direction of adapting military weapons and tactics. This event, along with civil unrest, would actually lead to the creation of the LAPD’s first SWAT team in 1967 (2014). Like many other innovations that big cities decide to come up with, smaller cities would attempt to follow in their footsteps.
The mid-1960s were in full swing, and disorder was beginning to be seen as a political issue. With the crime rate in the US climbing and the media jumping on the bandwagon of publicizing every moment of it, President Johnson enacted the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which eventually became the DEA (Balko, 2013). This executive action ended up being only one of many new responses to crime and how the US government was not going to sit idly by. As the 20th century

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