I am totally with you on that. This is a violent and armed society - and this makes police work extremely difficult. When I was at SJSU one of my classmates was a Black cop - a middle age liberal guy taking sociology classes to improve his chances for a promotion - hardly a scumbag that the macho wannabe gangstas on this list love to describe. We had a few lively discussion of police brutality as the interest in the subject was fed by a documentary aired on public television.
What I got from him is pretty much consistent with what you posted. Domestic calls are probably one of deadliest for law enforcement. One story that stuck in my memory was a cocaine crazed guy who used his girl friends infant as a human shield, slitting its throat with a kitchen knife to keep the cops at bay. The errors that the cops made in that case was that they did not shoot the perp as soon as he pulled the knife. This guy also told me that situation like that are quite common in police work - which makes me think that what the shows like 'Cops" show is a highly sanitized version of the police work.
In Baltimore, the most common complaint about police work is not "brutality" but the lack of responsiveness - I hear time and again that calling the police emergency number is practically useless because the "police always come late if they come at all" (apologies to Tracy Chapman).
According to National Crime Victimization Survey data http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict_v.htm Blacks are more likely than whites to be victimized by crime. For violent crime, per 1,000 persons, 28 Blacks and 23 Whites are victims of violent crime, and 174 Blacks and 158 Whites are victims of property crime.
It is then no surprise that effective policing is a high priority among Black community activists. This is very much different than many of those who live in sheltered suburbs or college campuses think. From that point of view, cop bashing popular among many leftists is silly and counterproductive. A better strategy is demand higher levels of professionalism and public accountability of the police force.
PS. When did you live in Monterey? I lived there between 1982 and 1986 and then moved to Santa Cruz for a while.
Wojtek