No, this is just a simple matter of economics; you get what you pay for.
A city that pays its police officers a decent salary can demand a higher quality of police officer and can place higher standards of qualification on applicants seeking employment as police officers. Of course this requires higher taxes and most cities hesitate to raise taxes sufficiently to cover the cost of a quality police force. As a result of this, a city will wind up with low quality police officers, and in many cases these police officers are nothing but thugs with badges.
You bring up an interesting point. When I met my wife she lived in a small midwestern town. A lot of the local teen and pre-teen males were having ridiculous run-in’s with the local sheriff’s deputies over nit issues. I mean police brutality stuff.
But my wife sais, that it is what you expect when you have guys in their early 20’s with almost no training making minimum wage, and then hand them a Glock and a badge.
You avoided the police there if at all possible.
Oh, you mean like paying Airport Security 3x more and making them Federal Employees all made us safer?
Or, perhaps you mean paying teachers more, and removing any qualifying standards while watching our student's achievement scores plummet?
But, hey ... it's GOTTA work this time. Sure, let's pay unskilled, uneducated policemen more money ... and just magically their quality of performance will skyrocket.
Ever hear of "Magical Thinking"? It would be a whole lot cheaper to buy them some mystical tattoos.
Bullcrap. How much does Lois Lerner make? How about Eric Holder?
Most police are being trained:
a) that all citizens are potential perps, and should be treated accordingly
b) that they must "take charge" of the situation immediately in order to minimize risk to themselves, so an attack on their authority or ignoring their commands is a direct threat to them
c) they are "highly trained" and civies are not, so that they should naturally be in charge and civies don't know what they are talking about, by default.
These attitudes are intentional and prevalent (and taught in the academy... I know this for a FACT). Add to this the massive affirmative action most police forces implement so that they can get the "right" number of women, et al., on the force, and you have the recipe for police misconduct. It's about the kind of people you look for (morally) and how you train them. Police have never made large salaries... but they weren't the same kind of people in the past.
It has literally nothing to do with salaries.