You seem to equate high salary with compassion. What is this notion based on?

It's less about compassion and more about risk. Risk in the sense of the physical danger an officer goes into, but also in the sense that we are removing protections for the officer and holding them to a higher standard.

The most common cause of death for police officers is traffic fatalities. Should we pay highway construction crews 300K+?

That’s a terrible analogy. Obviously they’re more at risk of dying a violent death and that’s why they need to pay more

Not really: they're safer at work than you are at home. Police work is very safe in the USA. But it can be very unpleasant and stressful.

The idea that policing is inherently dangerous is most useful to police when negotiating the next contract.

That is absolutely not true and I don’t know why you think that, other than you’re super sheltered. You have no clue what you’re talking about

Tell me why the Mexican Mafia has no teeth. Enlighten me. Tell me why the Aryan Brotherhood is less dangerous than Kubernetes

It’s not ever worth discussing with y’all, seriously. The privilege here is so insane, you’ve obviously never been anywhere near a ghetto

Your assumption is entirely wrong. I equate high pay to high expectations and higher quality applicants.

Why?

We can assume x% of applicants are actually qualified, instead of "Good enough and we need bodies". If we increase pay, we increase total applicants - which, assuming x stays constant, means we end up with more actually qualified cops.

Why not?

Judging from this thread full of compassionate people, it's pretty clear to me that they should be the ones being cops, and not the current cops.

So we should compensate cops the equivalent salary of a software developer, to create incentives for a career change, and then we can train former cops as software developers. We might end up with more bugs in software, but at least there will not be any police abuse any more.

Like the 'Blackwater' PMC/merc type of guys?

Maybe you are right, but it didn't seem to work in Hong Kong. Here a new recruit is paid nearly 6000 USD / month after tax, double that of a new software engineer. I think you've seen the outcome in the news.