[tertiary]

> but those teams are only deployed in situations like bank robberies, hostage situations, school shootings, etc

That's not true and is the reason people are upset. Nobody disagrees with the use of SWAT teams for school shooting and the like. However, that isn't how militarized units are used in real life. There simply isn't enough violent crime in most areas to justify a full time force dedicated to it. Instead, SWAT is used to target drug offenses (often times w/o an indication that there will be violence). In fact, the federal 1033 program (which funnels military hardware to the police) was founded to help fight the war on drugs.

The other big use of SWAT is for search warrants where they have replaced patrol officers in 80% of cases, the vast majority of which don't involve any suspicion that things will get violent.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/new-documents-r...