We should be careful to draw a causal relationship here. It might not be that getting the military equipment causes police to be more aggressive and therefore have more killings. It might instead be that the more aggressive police departments are the ones that more seek to purchase military equipment, and the more aggressive police are the ones with more killings. I tend to think that's the case. Regardless, there is…
Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. I could not read the article because it is blocked for me.
> The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates.
The article explicitly cautions against drawing conclusions about causality. My intuition is that there’s truth to both explanations: cosplaying as a military makes police more violent, and intrinsically violent departments are more likely to seek out military equipment.
And frankly, the second conclusion scares me more. If the causal relationship is “equipment —> violence”, we can solve it by simply banning the use of military equipment by police. If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians.