I'm not sure about the other equipment, but I can say that police definitely need designated marksman rifles(7.62x51mm NATO)and infantry rifles(5.56x45mm NATO [typo'd as 6.65mm in the article]) as a matter of course.<p>Here in Toronto the other month, right across the street from my home, there was a man having a mental breakdown in a park swinging a handgun around, and they had five marksmen in range ready to take a shot if it got out of hand on the ground, and rifles on the ground to make sure it doesn't get too far out of hand.<p>Grenade launchers are fairly common equipment for a police force these days, there are a large number of crowd control and tactical (visibility flares, IR flares) devices which can be launched out of standard grenade launchers, since the military has brought down the cost of this equipment, police forces seem to standardize around it.<p>The border states having higher spending on weaponry and armour is intuitively understandable, given how hot the border is. Per-landmass and per-police-officer numbers might also be a more interesting stat to look at.<p>LA county makes regular use of their armoured vehicles, that I understand. So unless you're arguing that police officers in LA county should just let themselves get shot when people are shooting at them, I think it'd be hard to imagine it being a bad thing that they have armoured vehicles.<p>Explosive Ordinance Disposal vehicles (and other equipment, such as X-ray imaging devices, tracked robotic vehicles, projected water disruptors) make a lot of sense. The New York Police Department has had a bomb squad since 1903(!). If you love the idea of bomb technicians being shredded into mists of blood, flesh, and bone; or love going to funerals where there is no recovered corpse, then sure, their lives are not worth even a couple hundred k per capita, less than the average person in the general population in the U.S. government's estimation.