4 years of full-time undergrad is not far from that. It certainly varies per university but where I'm at you have to take 5 classes per semester, 2 semesters a year for 4 years to get an engineering degree, with the expectation each class will take 8-10 hours of your time a week (predictably very few students finish on time), for 17 weeks each semester, for around 7000 hours of work.

You then need 2-3 years of supervised work before you are considered to be a full engineer.

On the computer science side if you don't go for engineering, you have just as many classes, and you're generally not considered to be a real, productive software engineer out of college.

In another country I studied in, to get a CS degree you need 5 years of specialized postsecondary education, and 6 for engineering (highschool ends a year sooner). That's 8500 to 10200 hours of full-time specialized postsecondary education, only for you to be considered barely useful when you come out.

I think it's less about bigotry towards plumbers and more about prejudice towards cops.

"Prejudice" means literally "to judge before". I would describe this attitude towards cops more as "postjudice".

I want to live in a world where the people legally allowed to kill me in the street are the high bar on education.

They are only legally allowed to kill you with good reason. And in many countries, the same rules apply to you.

Non police are also legally allowed to kill others who pose imminent harm to themselves or others. You don't lose rights when you take the job of a police officer.