One of the biggest disgraces in the United States is police militarization.
Police have become increasingly militarized. Some of it makes sense, such as giving SWAT officers access to submachine guns and US Army surplus M113's. However, such equipment should only be used in when necessitated by circumstances, not for going on patrol or serving warrants against people who are not suspected to be heavily-armed. On the other hand, a lot of the militarization doesn't make any sense at all. Neither patrol officers nor SWAT officers need assault rifles. Automatic rifle fire is intended to get people to keep their heads down; submachine guns are justifiable due to the reduced lethality of pistol ammunition, but rifles are not justifiable. I'd also like to know why some city police SWAT officers wear woodland camouflage even when there are no forests close enough for it to be useful. Police have no use for .50BMG-caliber rifles. They were designed for target shooting at ranges far longer than police snipers engage at. When they were adopted by the military, the primary use is for shooting through a couple of inches of steel into the engines of lightly-armored vehicles. Police almost definitely won't encounter armored vehicles of any sort, so the standard .308WIN rifle that most police and military snipers use should suffice for anti-materiel purposes, especially in an urban environment, where .50BMG is far too powerful a cartridge due to the likelihood that the bullet will keep going after passing through the target and hit someone or something.
I have a few suggestions:
1. CS gas should not be used for building clearing. As the ending of the Waco siege shows, canisters containing solid CS which is ignited on use pose a serious fire hazard. In fact, don't use it for crowd dispersal either. If that was done by military forces, they'd be considered unlawful combatants, and therefore, would no longer be protected by the Geneva Convention.
2. Stop issuing the latest military surplus equipment to police. Only give SWAT access to armored vehicles if they'll take heavy fire. If a guy is holding a room hostage, there's no need to drive up to the building in what is essentially a WWII light tank with passengers instead of a big gun on top.
3. Instead of issuing firearms to police, give officers a certain amount of money so that they can buy their own weapons. An AR-15-style rifle, for example, is, for all intents and purposes, an M16 or M4 where you have to pull the trigger every time you want another bullet to come out. Police don't have any use for assault rifles such as the M16 or M4 unless they're set to semi-automatic. Having the rifle constantly set on semi-automatic negates the difference between an assault rifle and rifles that can be legally acquired by non-military or police customers without going through bureaucratic hell. However, it is reasonable for police departments to set requirements on what types of weapons the officers would purchase (examples: handguns must be pistols and not revolvers; rifles must not fire full-power rifle calibers; rifles must be semi-automatic; rifles must not fire pistol calibers; rifles must be AR-15's; rifles must be AK-47 derivatives; rifles and handguns must be of certain calibers; rifles must be compatible with standard NATO 5.56mm rifle magazines).
4. If a county has a police department and a sheriff's department, combine the two. There's no need for two law enforcement agencies in one municipality.
5. As the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are both officially tax-collection agencies (although they seem to have fantasies of being the Gestapo), merge the two into the Internal Revenue service.