You’ve clearly never feared for you life at the hands of strangers with guns and been violently abused in that scenario before if you think any one would ever put a price on that trauma.

Police officers make 6 figures in NYC.

Edit: (original post incorrectly stated starting pay) https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-benefits.page

They start at 42 and that doubles after 5 years with additional benefits for prior military service.

The problem is not pay, it is a good career option for not needing a 4 year degree. It is qualification, training, and standard. Why can’t we train police officers to also be social workers? The public would support them making even more if they did that. It’s because there is a culture problem. It is ‘us vs them’ and incredibly dogmatic and heterogenous. Good cops leave because the bad cops are protected. Would you keep showing up to your job if it was an incredibly toxic environment with little to no training or support for you to do what you actually signed up to do? The good cops give up, and it has nothing to do with pay. Abolishing and starting from scratch would be the best solution in any scenario. But everyone knows if the cops got fired they would just become the mob in a more dangerous way than they are now. Whatever the solution is, it needs to be radical. This is not a, solve from within possible fix.