Pressure builds for US police to change military mindset

On a September morning in 2008, Brian Wood made a distraught retreat from a heated dispute with his wife and sat down with a gun in his truck in the driveway of his suburban Salt Lake City home. The part-time firefighter was having a mental health crisis, and he fired two warning shots when police arrived at the beginning of a 12-hour standoff.

Wood’s father-in-law, William “Dub” Lawrence – a former local sheriff who founded the Davis County Sheriff Department’s SWAT team in 1975 – stood behind the official cordon and watched the standoff escalate with horror and regret. More than 100 law enforcement officers, including 46 SWAT members swarmed to the scene, armed and clothed in fatigues like combat soldiers, militarizing a mental health problem.

Wood eventually was forced from his truck by tear gas and pepper spray, hit with rubber bullets and pepper balls, tasered, and then fatally shot.

The escalation of that situation, says Mr. Lawrence who now advocates against the militarization of police, is evidence of a paramilitary mindset pervading American policing…

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