There's a fair amount of research that suggests that tricking out the police in combat gear increases rather than decreases fear, hostility, and violence among the populace.
As to your suspicion that Officer Friendly would not survive among the populace, two points:
1. I reiterate, there were riots on Sunday. Since then, there have been protests every day, which even the police say have been peaceful.
2. Officer Friendly has a high-capacity 9mm automatic, a Taser, a baton, and mace. He also has a radio and a command post and a whole bunch of other trained, organised Officer Friendlies to aid him. How much of a military advantage do the cops need to control a crowd? Artillery? Airstrikes? (OK, that last was a little sarcastic. Not meant to disrespect you, just to express goggle-eyed disbelief that you need black fatigues, body armour, Kevlar helmets, balaclavas, and purpose-designed infantry weapons to do crowd control).
I didn't say "the rate of crime." I used one specific crime, drug possession, as an example. The evidence shows pretty conclusively that more serious and violent crime rates are higher in the black population than in the white population. However, the evidence also shows pretty conclusively that non-whites are arrested more, convicted more, and receive harsher sentences for comparable crimes with comparable defendants than whites.
And even though the rate of crime and violent crime is higher among non-whites than among whites, that does not give the police the authority or the reason to harass non-whites. To say that because 75% of all the crime is commited by non-whites (that's a hypothetical, not the actual figues) means that a given non-white is 50% more likely to be a criminal is not only repugnant to the concept and law of equal protection, it is an erroneous application of statistics.
FloridaJayhawk @HouseCracka 
