I readily accept your first point. I guess I messed up my delivery of the first point. It wasn't meant so much as a rebuttal or counterpoint, but something of a

I readily accept your first point. I guess I messed up my delivery of the first point. It wasn't meant so much as a rebuttal or counterpoint, but something of a "random aside". The point wasn't that they "militarized" the police, especially in the way militarized is often used today in the context of American law enforcement (with the implications of increased use of aggressive force), but rather that its kinda funny that their solution to trying to back off on the level of violence was to impose aspects of military like control. Of course, in the long view it's pretty obvious why that happened. Consider why modern western militaries are structured and organized the way they are. The state has a monopoly on force, which requires not just the owning the army, but to be able to control the application of force down to the level of individual soldier. Obviously the control can never be perfect, but I think its pretty clear that it typically works well enough. I guess my point is that especially in the context of the 19th century, militarization has two orthogonal aspects, the first being the nature and quantity of force to apply, and the second being control of force, and that when faced with the problem of overly aggressive police action, they sought to apply control by applying aspects of military organization - aspects which the military could claim to "own" first, just because they were only groups around with that type of organization at that time.