@ucbalumnus - most of what you’re posting here has been well known, to anyone who follows urban policing in America, for nearly half a century.
Cops in America are forced to be social workers-- a role for which they are not equipped and against which they are unfairly and wrongly measured.
No other advanced nation assigns them this misfit role that we do. (Perhaps the British have started to do so, but they don’t have to deal with anywhere near the level of violence that US cities do.)
For over 40 years US politicians of both left and right have dumped on our police the responsibility to sort out-- haphazardly, post-hoc and often in the teeth of opposition from showboating local elected officials-- almost all of the most dysfunctional elements of American urban society.
Among other monstrous problems, these include all the pathological behaviors of unbelievably violent drug addicts and murderous gang members whose rites of passage include random slaughter of their neighbors, as well as the self-destructive actions of mental health sufferers who were de-institutionalized in the Reagan era.
(Note that this “reform” of Reagan’s is evidence of bipartisan ownership of the problem.)
The solution is not to blame the police but to fix those institutions that give rise to such extraordinary levels of social dysfunction in this nation’s urban areas.
If we Americans could agree on the above and stop trashing our police, we might start solving our problems and move forward. Peace.
(and peace out, for me)