You have no clue as to what the average police man or woman has to put up with and encounters on a daily basis. And 99% of them perform their duties with the upmost professionalism. You almost sound like one of those "defund the police" advocates who need to be thrown into the fire they just started while rioting in the streets.
Thing is, that defunding the police will be the natural thing to do, once
- Society realises that spending the money early, on social workers and schools, gives one order of magnitude better payback. (one of our larger insurance companies has a research trust that has spent 40 years examining this. The results are overwhelming.
- The current arms race between criminals and police, in no small part fueled by the reasonable suspicion that everyone has a gun in some countries, is damped
- The penal correction facilities correct instead of punish
All those are way hard for a society that's has a big gun fetish coupled to a pathetic lack of trust -- and a racist generalisation tendency for that extra dB -- in a big feedback loop that'd make one of BD's amplifiers green with envy 
But, of course, you can't do it on/off, it needs to be done gradually. And as in all research, you'll need extra funds to do the deployment, so perhaps "fund social work, make schools work, fix healthcare, then lower police budgets".
But, that would rob the churches and the insurance industry of their social testicle grip. Can't have that, no. (We of course call the absence of this action freedom, ie. freedom to perish.)
Both visions here are incorrect. med, for shame. I thought you knew me better than that. I've spent my time arm-in-arm with the local constabulary, and no matter what you think, things used to be a lot different. The entire us vs them attitude was not the norm; the sheriff was part of the community, he broke bread with us in our home more than a few times, and the attitude was definitely "keep the peace first" rather than "shoot first, lie on the paperwork later".
It wasn't Andy Griffith show for sure, but it damned straight wasn't the pseudo-military clusterfuck it is now.
It was that interaction at a young age with my local law enforcement that got me into the Fire Dept; I wanted to do some good. There I spent time similarly in the same buildings as our local Police... had my own share of fly on the wall experiences... and even then, it was very obvious that there were cliques in even our rural Police Dept. There were the peacekeepers... and there were the ones who were just in it to carry a gun and hoping for a chance to shoot something... or someone.
Move several decades forward, and living in Tejas; particularly working contract IT you again get those fly-on-the-wall moments, and some of the things I overheard on jobs would make your skin crawl. Houston... OMG. I lived in the districts where half of the cops get into it just to have an excuse to shoot black people, and that is what it was aboot. No other way to look at it.
Bottom line is that society has changed for the worse on both sides of the thin blue line... no doubt. But don't get cause and effect backwards. The callousness behind the badge is not caused by the shit on the streets; it is the other way around. The shit on the streets is because of the us vs them attitude in law enforcement. It is because the Police are no longer our neighbors, they are a military organization in the middle of our homes. They aren't there to keep the peace, they're there to be the face of "Law and Order"; a complete and utter facade. There is no accountability for them, and every citizen... good or bad... knows it.
If anything, I advocate spending more on the Police... but not more on weapons. More feet on the ground, less tanks. Preferably,
zero tanks. We have plenty of actual military organizations with feet on the ground in our neighborhoods with the various alphabet soup agencies, the Coast Guard and National Guard... that kind of action is what they're supposed to be doing. We need enough Police Officers patrolling that they become familiar faces... and that there are enough of them that they can get to know the people in a neighborhood personally, instead of their only interaction with the public being a fucking traffic ticket.
There are so many more people in every city; there needs to be a similar increase in the number of Police officers. And we need to be a lot more careful in how we choose them; so the ones just looking for an excuse to shoot someone aren't.
We need to spend the money training them to actually protect and serve first, and that shooting is the last course, not the first, and to be able to know the difference, even in a split-second situation. We need to spend the money on payroll... so that they can actually have humane work hours and not be working exhausted half the time.
We need to spend the money on education... so that kids grow up knowing that the Police are there for them, not against them. And conversely, we need to make that the truth, not just a pretty ideal we pay lip service to.
I know that's a lot of wishful thinking; human nature is to abhor actually changing anything, and especially to abhor spending money on
people. It is to just keep your head down and do your best to get by. But we've grown in number to the point where we simply must grow as a society... or we will self-destruct. That means just plain hard work and change.
mnem
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