<i>The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening.</i><p>They are public servants, but not &quot;our servants&quot; - such a possessive pronoun implies the police are obligated to protecting individuals comprising a populace. They are not (Castle Rock v. Gonzales). Rather, they exist to enforce some relative order as defined by a state entity in the jurisdiction the police is beholden to. As a result, they enforce policies favorable to a state, not to a community. If the latter was the goal, then policing would be a decentralized per-neighborhood activity with rules of conduct set by the neighborhood or community. In practice, this means police forces fundamentally must operate through a system of fear, intimidation and coercion in their enforcing of standards that are non-negotiable by the subordinate community. It should then come as no surprise they are increasingly militarized, since their structure lends itself to paramilitary.<p>Police forces then are optimized precisely for people who are not &quot;the best of us&quot;, since there is no particular requirement for anything but systematized and mechanical use of intimidation to control populations and curtail protests.