your service is appreciated, soldier.
(in all seriousness though, the "war on drugs" is just another topic i could ramble about for pages, it's so ridiculously ham-fisted and racist and clearly corrupt and not working anyway)

*Punisher-wannabe

The problem is, whether the abusing force is police or military, they are only ever a reflection of and reinforcement for the white supremacist and patriarchal values that we are socialized to accept and propagate.

Lemme go off topic for a moment. Look at how the US military behaved in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Korea. Or Vietnam. The Philippines. Or Japan. Or, hell, on US soil, with regard to genocide against an entire continent of separate nations of native peoples. We have a long track record of indiscriminate bombing, gassing, shooting, torturing, and raping of civilians... in short, a record of genocidal tactics carried out against people of color. Our colonialist roots and current colonialist efforts in much of Africa mean many African countries/groups within those countries have been so disenfranchised in many ways that declaring out and out war is not (often) necessary.
Now look at how they behaved in Germany. I would name more incidents to the opposite, but... surprise! We (that is, the US) don't have many other spats with white people, because we don't often fight with (read: oppress/attempt to exterminate) white people.

Important to note: during WWII, we fire bombed some German industrial areas... whereas we fire bombed Japanese towns. One has a strategic rationalization behind it. The other is a war crime and is obviously used to kill off populations of random, innocent civilians.

Military and police are run by the same kind of people, and therein lies the problem. The people pulling the strings don't care if a person of color (here, it's black people - in other regions it's natives or "arabs" or "immigrants") is killed by a drone strike or a gun; they don't want to punish the white person doing the killing, because they think it's totally reasonable for a white cop to gun down an unarmed black 18 year old.
Hell, they didn't even charge the guy who killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones. She was seven and asleep on the couch in her own home. All she did was sit up when a cop burst into her house, and he shot her in the head, and they dropped his fucking charges.
They've set as a precedent that it is okay for a police to shoot and kill an unarmed black child and get away with it. There have never been repercussions for such an act (if you're a white cop), and they're saying, here and now, while everyone is watching, that there never will be because that's the law. And a large (but not surprising) number of (mostly white) people agree with them.

Small revisions of a police state still leave you with a police state. The answer is not an easy one, and not one I'm prepared to discuss at length on weasyl... but police militarization is really a distraction from the underlying problem of police being horrifically racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, etc. and policing people of color, women, mogai individuals, etc.
Abuses are gonna happen when you let someone have power over people they hate and fear and think of as lesser beings... and cops without military weaponry still have plenty of power to hurt people. All the black people killed by cops - literally at least one a week since at least August - were killed by handguns... mostly 9mm. Nothing special, but those people are still dead.

All that having been said, I don't think the police should have nearly the amount of fire-power they do, if they are to exist at all. But as I said... that's an entirely separate discussion.

by that I mean: for whatever reason the trigger was pulled, I wonder that if the same things happened any other day, would the dude have thought twice about killing another human being because he would have felt like he was under more scrutiny?