It's a horrible result from horrible, quota etc. driven policing, especially as "real" crime continues to drop (you don't notice any layoffs in the police-judicial complex strictly from this statistical decline, do you?). If they really wanted to do what we perceive as their jobs, they wouldn't be faced with this problem. (And that's not even getting into the thesis that outside of e.g. very small rural departments there are by definition no good police, since even the "good" police look the other way in observing the Blue Wall of Silence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence.)

Perhaps the most important thesis in Arrest Proof Yourself (http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-A...) is that the decline in real crime, which the police and courts by and large still do as good a job of dealing with, has required them to generate more arrests, convictions, and parole based entrapments, primarily from those the authors describe as "the clueless", the harmless to mostly harmless who do dumb things that are illegal but not a great threat to society.

To the extent they view "their job" as doing whatever their superiors demand to e.g. achieve quotas of arrests, my heart bleeds.