There's very little oversight of how the police spend their money, which leads to instances like Snoqualmie purchasing a mine-resistant armored vehicle instead of investing in training.
I won't advocate via the mantra of "defund the police" because, as I pointed out, no one agrees on what that means. This distortion of language makes it very difficult to have rational discussion. Witness all the problems caused by not understanding that "protesting" and "rioting" are actually different activities and that "mostly peaceful" is not a valid synonym for "frequently violent".
The vocabulary of critical social justice theory is another minefield of words used in novel ways. Lots of people don't understand this (including myself until I started researching this recently) so you get very divisive interactions going on because people are talking past each other.
Madness.
Right now, officers are trained and conditioned in a way that keeps their gun at the forefront of responses. Especially in Minneapolis, where--as of six years ago--96% of the MPD were not from Minneapolis, but commuted from surrounding suburbs, there's an "us vs them" occupier mentality that results from not being a public servant in your own neighborhood. Many MPD cops openly talk about Minneapolis being akin to entering a warzone.
If we had people properly trained in deescalating non-violent or domestic situations, who people would feel confident in calling because they wouldn't be worried about somehow getting shot, the armed officers would be able to focus their efforts on the situations requiring their presence.
It's a complicated situation. But it's been shown time and again that our system isn't necessarily working, and it would be beneficial to look at other approaches and countries for guidance.