No, they generally do the latter, and generally well.

One problem is there just aren't enough killers etc. anymore, crime rates are way down from their peaks not so many decades ago. But, somehow, where this has happened, it hasn't resulted in a reduction in the size of what I like to call the police-judicial complex. This book's underlying thesis is that too avoid unthinkable layoffs, the complex needs a steady diet of "the clueless" to keep running at it's current tempo: Arrest-Proof Yourself (https://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/d...) I haven't read the 2nd edition I linked to, but I can't recommend the 1st highly enough in every respect, theory to practice.

Your fist mistake is expecting anyone in America to care about your suffering.

There you are wrong, starting with e.g. reporter Radley Blako and his readers, and extending to large swaths of the white or thereabouts population who buy books like Arrest-Proof Yourself (http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...) This was reified for me in ~2008 when a local cop played a game of chicken with his car and my body.

Some of it is that the author lives in Santa Clara County, California as mentioned in another comment. Citizens in Bay Area counties are allowed to own (some types of) guns, but by and large not to carry them, and that appears to help the Badge Gang feel they can treat nearly the entire populace as their playthings.

Take that too far in my part of the country, a combo of Greater Appalachia and the cultural South, and the calculus changes rather a lot. And in my county, when I last renewed my concealed carry permit, 5% of the age eligible population had one, and gun ownership is not quite ubiquitous, but extremely common and steadily increasing. And many of the cops are on our side; can you imagine a Santa Clara County law enforcement public affairs type confirming that a woman had an "absolute right" to use lethal force against some home invaders?

Thing is, though, when the US has been literally acting as an occupying army in the sandbox as of late, they have much more restrictive Rules of Engagement; in the ones relevant to this sort of thing, as I recall they're not that bad.

Perhaps best explained by Marine General James Mattis, "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet", one of his rules to live by for his men in Iraq.

I personally have no problems with their equipment loadout (it's too much like mine!), it's the attitudes, it's their actions, in too many localities their arrest quotas (see the very highly recommended http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...). The equipment has no agency.

I call this the police-judicial complex; they have a "problem" in that between the end of the demographic Baby Boom and the partial reversion of the soft on crime '60s and '70s, there is much less real crime. Per the thesis of Arrest-Proof Yourself (http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...) that means in much of the country they'd have to downsize if they didn't "feed" upon a steady stream of what the authors refer to as "the clueless", most especially the sorts of people who can't realistically follow all their probation restrictions.

Obviously much, much better than them suffering layoffs. And I'l criticize the media again with their "if it bleeds, it leads" bias, how many in the US realize crime is down so much from that old peak?

> Really, convicted of a felony, you're guaranteed lifetime financial insolvency?

This is actually flat out true. All large companies perform background checks and none of them will hire you if have any sort of criminal charges whatsoever. You don't even have to have been found guilty. This is called the "digital plantation" by one ex-policeman who wrote a book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...

Yes, from everything I've read, e.g. there's been some recent leaks about the NYPD, and I highly recommend this classic (or its first edition, haven't read the second): http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp... (which Amazon says is the #1 best seller in "Consumer Law Business Law", which I believe).