The crackdown by police in the Ferguson, Missouri protests revealed just how militarized American law enforcement has become.

But it’s not just militarization of the police that’s a problem—it’s that police departments also are taking the wrong lessons from the military. In particular, the idea that the military is all hammers … and views every problem as a nail.

To be sure, police forces aren’t the military and shouldn’t be. But even the military trains for crowd control. Soldiers train for—and participate in—peacekeeping missions that require different approaches than combat does.

The Army also trains to use force against demonstrators—even lethal force. But for domestic police to adopt a poor copy of military tactics neglects that the military views itself as a last resort for crowd control.

And even then, there’s a wide gulf between how the military trains to deal with crowds and how the St. Louis County Police Department acted.

The mostly-white county police deployed surplus military vehicles and riot gear against a mostly black crowd. As the situation deteriorated, the police put on camouflage gear and cracked down even harder. They shot protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas—including gassing people standing in their own yards. Police snipers took up positions on armored vehicles.

All of this rough, intimidating treatment led members of the community to ask—quite rightly—whether the police were acting not as police, but as an oppressive, occupying force.

“Winning in this environment is not like winning in combat,” notes FM 3–19.15, the Army’s field manual on civil disturbance operations. “U.S. forces may appear to be invincible and formidable, but they risk being portrayed as oppressors. Thus, U.S. forces can lose by appearing to win.”

The St. Louis County police lost. As demonstrators took to the streets outraged at Brown’s death, the department emphasized a show of force. On Aug. 13, police shoved around and arrested journalists from the Washington Post and the Huffington Post.

How much things changed on Thursday. The state police relieved the local police of command under the order of Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon. The troopers pulled the riot cops off the streets and the state police commander, Capt. Ronald Johnson, marched with the protesters, talked to them and got out in front of the media.

The initial demands of the protesters—and investigation into the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, are still far from met. But the shift in tactics and the marked change in how the protesters behaved shows that peacekeeping works.