does anyone remember the hyped up pretext for police militarization

Yes.

It's not the presence of the gear that's troubling, it's the utter misuse of it.

You're not going to have one without the other.

Exert from Vice - S03E02 - To Serve and Protect & Coming to America

"The 1033 program was so popular with police departments, by 1996 the DOD had given out $330 million worth of old military gear. Now, thanks to surpluses created by our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, cops in America have 1033'ed $5 billion worth of used Army gear, and on top of that, since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has given cops an extra $35 billion so they can buy new gear to fight terrorists with.

You have a militarized mentality.A lot of police departments have switched to these battledress uniforms.You get the rhetoric. It's the constant sort of intonation that you're fighting a war, and these are two very fundamentally different jobs.Unfortunately, I think a lot of politicians think because they both involve carrying guns and using force, uh, that the skill sets are interchangeable.

Norm Stamper was the chief of the Seattle Police Department during the WTO protests in 1999. He's the guy who put cops in storm trooper uniforms on American streets in front of the eyes of the global media.

Norm Stamper: Well, I screwed it up royally. We were totally overwhelmed by numbers, but then we did something really, really foolish. We tear-gassed non-threatening, non-violent demonstrators who simply wouldn't obey our order. When we dress police officers like soldiers, they're likely to act like soldiers.

Soldiers follow orders for a living. Police officers make decisions for a living.

When that kind of mentality, that kind of attire and weaponry and equipment is trotted out in virtually everyday use, we got a problem.We have American police departments acting like an occupational force.

Morton: Public outrage over the soldierization of the American policeman has led to an escalating, seemingly unbreakable cycle, which people protest heavy-handed policing tactics, the police react by using those exact same heavy-handed tactics, it's now escalated to the point that not only do the cops represent an occupying army, civilians have gone past protest and begun threatening and attacking individual officers like insurgents under an occupation."