They should. The phenomenon of heavily-armed police spending most of their working hours either in a squad car or actively handling a disturbance, rather than walking a beat, is a modern one. It's something Peter Moskos laments in Cop In The Hood, which is a pretty decent book on the practices of modern police forces written by a sociologist who served for a year as an experiment.

Beat policing is not one of the most dangerous occupations in the US, and a lot of the danger police face is self-generated: readiness to escalate conflict alters the calculus of offenders as well.

The big issue we have with current police forces is cultural, and it probably can't be fixed by fiat. We'll have to do it at the organization level, through attrition. It's simple. For simplicity of discussion, rename all current patrol officers "assault officers"; they're the heavily armed ones that spend their day in cars or in confrontation. Now: stop hiring new assault officers. Instead, for every assault officer headcount you'd hire, bring in 1.5-3 new "compliance officers" who can walk beats, help people, de-escalate simple criminal incidents, and very quickly summon assault officers.

(I also think that most police officers should simply be disarmed. They should have ready access to long guns, perhaps in the trunk of their squad car, but they shouldn't be 5 seconds from killing someone else at all times during their work day.)

In sum, you and others seem to describe the present situation as a result of a more violent historical past? And maybe it could be more like an European model?

Thanks, that answers my question.

(Regarding the equal number of up/down votes on my previous comment: Save the emotional energy. :-) I'm a curious European without a clue about the related political discussion. I'm sorry if I stepped on any toes; for the record, my home country is probably more dysfunctional than USA, but in different ways.)

"they're the heavily armed ones that spend their day in cars or in confrontation"

This is simplifying quite a bit. Right now, most LEO are not in positions that require being heavily armed or in confrontation. The vast majority of LEO currently are in positions where being armed is not a benefit, if not a outright detriment, but their training and regulation require them to carry weapons unsafely (see for instance court security police who must carry weapons, except when they are in the courts where they actually work and where they must not carry weapons, leading to them all walking around with empty holsters all day).

The other side of this is of course corrections officers, who have objectively the most dangerous jobs in LEO but receive the least training, the least pay, and the least equipment.

It turns out this is quite simply a cultural problem. The culture of law enforcement in the United States right now is quite simply dangerous and irrational. Without fixing that culture, renaming titles isn't going to go very far.

Renaming the titles isn't the point. The point is freezing new hires into that culture, and creating a new culture to run in parallel to it.

There already exists a separate culture without weapons (corrections officers). Its universally less paid, less equipped, less respected and more dangerous.

So we create a third culture, beat cops who aren't gun slingers.

The history of policing in the US is a bad one, rife with torture and abuses that are heard about for decades until various notorious cases force the public to demand change. You also have generations of people who were legally allowed to be abused by police because of their race, or economic status.

That shapes the character of a country's police, and the people's response to them.

US cities are an order of magnitude more violent than cities in other countries, and there is major racial conflict (until fairly recently, police forces in majority black cities like DC were mostly white).