Any criminals with more than a single brain cell already know what cop response times are in their area. In the 60s-90s everybody had police scanners and cops talked over open radio about their locations and calls but crime still dropped massively in that time.
We already live in the safest time in the last few hundred years atleast, if not of all human history, all these fears about rampant crime are unfounded. And most crimes are committed by people you already know. Hell the biggest source of theft in the US, which dwarfs all other forms of theft combined, is employer wage theft. The cops deserve no trust because they have spent the last 6+ decades doing everything possible to militarize and become more draconian while extorting the poorest of society for fines and funding. Civil forfeiture laws are still abused on the daily and the entire US population knows it. Trust is earned, not given, and US cops and courts have done everything possible to destroy any trust between them and average citizens.
Maybe if I could trust that being executed on the side of a road by a cop in full view of the public and on camera would result in them going to jail people might support them having a bit of leeway, but they have repeatedly destroyed that notion. Cops are a far bigger threat to me than any petty criminals, most criminals were driven to crime through desperation so I can atleast sympathize with some of them. I have yet to meet a cop that wasn't a complete and utter asshole looking for any excuse to arrest or harass me or others around me.
Crime rates were substantially lower in the 50s, and prior, than they are today. The narrative about collapsing crime relies on starting sampling near the 60s at which point crime started exponentially skyrocketing, peaking at the 90s - where we hit the highest rates seen in modern history. The collapse of crime starting around that era correlates with an exponential rise in incarceration. In 1960 something like 400k Americans were imprisoned. Today it's around 2 million with the US having the highest incarceration rate in the entire world.
Similarly, the idea that crime is mostly by people you know is driven by another falsehood. That is only when the relationship between the victim and offender is known. The wide majority of crime has an offender that was either unknown to to the victim, or "relationship unknown." And the total number of cases of people killed by police who were not instigating physical resistance or aggression towards them is very near zero. There have been some really egregious cases, but they are very far and few between.
And yeah the 'cop personality' is pretty common, because it's cultivated in the training. They are going after the sort of people you probably don't even know exist, certainly not in the quantities that they do - especially with this image of reasonably people driven to desperation you've built up in your mind. These people will take any sign of hesitation or weakness as something to exploit. The 'cop personality' is a tool to help them do their job, even moreso than the tools on their belt.
We already live in the safest time in the last few hundred years atleast, if not of all human history, all these fears about rampant crime are unfounded. And most crimes are committed by people you already know. Hell the biggest source of theft in the US, which dwarfs all other forms of theft combined, is employer wage theft. The cops deserve no trust because they have spent the last 6+ decades doing everything possible to militarize and become more draconian while extorting the poorest of society for fines and funding. Civil forfeiture laws are still abused on the daily and the entire US population knows it. Trust is earned, not given, and US cops and courts have done everything possible to destroy any trust between them and average citizens.
Maybe if I could trust that being executed on the side of a road by a cop in full view of the public and on camera would result in them going to jail people might support them having a bit of leeway, but they have repeatedly destroyed that notion. Cops are a far bigger threat to me than any petty criminals, most criminals were driven to crime through desperation so I can atleast sympathize with some of them. I have yet to meet a cop that wasn't a complete and utter asshole looking for any excuse to arrest or harass me or others around me.