Come on, don't feed me a line of bull and we can have a conversation.
Look, if you were in it long enough, you know the training has changed. Your reply was all about cops protecting themselves. Guys who can't step up to a higher level of courage and responsibility for the lives around them shouldn't be in that line of work.
I used to be on friendly terms with the local cops. In the '90s their training obviously changed such that they became unapproachable. They no longer see the community as allies. When I busted a burglar about 5 years ago, the cops that came to get him either didn't speak to me, or the one who did thank me acted as if it was the strangest thing in the world for an able bodied member of the community to be observant about crime in the neighborhood.
The training today is all about control and projecting power. Even the appelation, LEO, is different from Police Officer or the older and more appropriate Peace Officer. They don't recruit for intelligence and judgment -- the system doesn't want cops on the street using their judgment. 'Knock 'em down, haul 'em in, and we'll sort it out' kind of an attitude is what's being taught today. So don't blame it on the inability to recruit good people. It's the training and the Police State attitude from the politicians and bureaucrats. Power and control positions attract thugs. The communists don't go by the name anymore, but the tyranny is unmistakably Soviet.
The "courage" crack sounds good but I'm not sure it carries the argument forward. Is it reasonable to expect everything you seem to expect of cops for what they are paid and how they are backed up and supported? Are you going to get the cops you want for that kind of compensation? Around here the really slick guys are doing private security tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and getting paid serious bucks for it.
Further, in the two incidents I described the cops in question were NOT just thinking of themselves. They were thinking of their department, of the taxpayers (when they worried about the department being sued) and of bystanders.
Then I think you are invalidly transitioning from the specific to the general. Among the cops YOU know, the training changed and "they became inapproachable". I would not say that is the case in my area.
As for the reaction to your busting a burglar, it IS unusual for non-LEOs to take decisive and useful action. I will eagerly agree that some cops have MAJOR control issues (my former captain for one) and would be very, ah, conflicted about somebody whom they cannot control doing something strong. I really don't know how common that is. But one consideration is if I don't know you from Adam, and you have detained a someone and are making a complaint against him, I simply cannot reasonably assume that you are the good guy and he is the bad guy.
Somebody once leveled a totally untruthful complain against me, before I was a cop. Fortunately the two cops who showed up formed a good judgment of her during their interview and then came up on my porch. When they asked me about the alleged violence I said,"Yeah, my wife (who was right next to me) is always beating me up." One of the cops looked at the other, then turned to me and smiled and said, with faux compassion,"It's just SO good that more men are able to admit this ...," and that was prety much the end of that.
But when the air is full of tension and pheremones, it's harder to make a good judgment call.
Your last paragraph sounds to me more like a profession of belief than a statement of facts. It does not comport with my training or that attitude of my colleagues. Yes, we try to project power, from the shine on our boots to the crease in our shirts to time we spend in the gym and the hoped for effect on the way those horrible polyester shirts drape over our dough-nut bellies. It is a tool of the trade to convey the idea that I could really lay a hurtin' on you if it came to that. But MY personal tactic is to try to appear like I don't know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, to make self-effacing jokes, and so forth. I want anybody who gets rough to be surprised when they find what a crappy choice that was. It gives me a fraction of a second to exploit. But that has, arguably, led to some guys thinking they could "take" me, which they MIGHT not have done had I looked more like I knew how to handle myself. It's a judgment call, and a matter of personal style.
Of course, I come from a weird area. Around here we LIKE it when people who aren't in Law Enforcement have concealed carry permits -- and we tell them so. When I fingerprinted people for their permits I always congratulated them, and so did other guys in my office.
I will also EAGERLY grant you that some police chiefs seem to be Liberal wimps in the pocket of paternalistic politicians. Fortunately that just doesn't go in our area.
I won't grant the significance of the term LEO. Some police officers get huffy when called deputies, some deputies vice versa. LEO is just a more general term. To me "Peace Officer" sounds Orwellian.
I wonder how safe it is for either of us to generalize ab out training. I know that here in Virginia the normal certified cop academy is 16 weeks. A friend who had left our department to become a state trooper will be taking another 20 weeks on top of that.
I was teaching a guy yesterday how to handle a handgun. He showed a lot of assumptions about police training. So I tried to wargame what it would be like to be able to get everybody to the range for half a day every two weeks. It's interesting to do the math and figure out how much that bumps up the salary budget if you're going to keep the same number of troops on active duty. And then when you figure firearms isn't half of what cops need to practice, study, or learn, you start getting an idea of the kind of money you're talking about.
Finally (I'm assuming we both have lives outside of Free Republic) consider this. We are trained to shoot at the Center of Mass. But the current thinking is that a COM shot isn't appropriate for a suicide bomber. So the white shirts are tossing around making head-shots the new standard. I think we have a problem here. A suicide bomber looks a lot like a jogger in the winter with a thick vest.
Have you read Grossman's "On Combat" or "On Killing"? He's pretty good and about the only Person (certainly the only former Army Ranger) studying what it's like to be a cop. They're worth a quick read.