Dr. Dwayne
Self proclaimed tagline king.
I'm in the camp of we need to change the laws to protect both cops and citizens - the mass availability of firearms, criminal justice reform, and more economic support for lower income people would be a good start.
This is good and a path that the US should follow.
For the reasons I outlined above - the current system with 300m firearms floating about and poor economic conditions for the lower class incentivizes confrontations among cops and citizens. Police Officers have judicial discretion on whether or not to engage so they are legally protected from penalty if they can show their interpretation of an incident meets a legal threshold. In a heavily armed society where both sides are operating in a security dilemma, confrontation is therefore incentivized. When you remove the weapons, the security dilemma is diminished. That requires a change in gun laws and economic conditions.
To be fair, I've read that only a few million people (something like 7-8 million) own half of those 300 million guns. I can confirm its hard to have just one.