This is key. People love to play the "what if the roles were reversed!" game when it comes to race and gender, even though those are just aspects of a person. People choose to be cops; we should hold them to an even higher standard than civilians.
If you want to hold them to a higher standard, you have to pay them to a higher standard.
That logic works when dealing with fast food workers, not agents of state-sanctioned violence. Those standards should be high regardless.
The same year, there were 1,104 recorded police uses of force.
That's 0.00002% of interactions if I did my math correctly. Even if you think the use of force data is a magnitude off, that's about the same risk factor as shark attacks and lightning strikes.
And use of force is only one type of lawbreaking in which cops regularly engage. Buffalo News compiled over 700 instances of sexual misconduct by officers over 10 years [2]. Anecdotally, I see police commit traffic infractions all the time.
None of this is really relevant to my question, though, so I'll pose it again: how much must we pay for police officers to obey the laws they're supposed to enforce?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... (filter by 2015)
[2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/bncore/projects/abusing-the-law/dat...
And let me know if ANY cops in the US have ever complained about overtime -- guaranteed overtime and overtime pay rate are often specified in police union contracts and there are tons of articles every year about cops making $100K+ overtime on top of base.
Source:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect...