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As others have pointed out, police officers are afforded a great deal of respect in most communities. Once you adjust for the actual qualifications required, it is hard to think of jobs that offer more respect—fireman and soldier come to mind, but there are not many. And in the few places where they aren't respected, they are at least generally well-compensated. To take an admittedly extreme example, Palo Alto publishes salaries for city employees and you'll often see fairly junior officers managing to pull in 200-300k compensation with the benefit of overtime.
Even outside of HCoL areas, being a police officer can be more lucrative than you'd think. Most departments offer full pensions after 20-25 years, and it is not uncommon for a cop to retire with a full pension from one department and then start over at a second department and collect another pension. (My elite psychiatrist grandfather had a summer house in a highly desirable part of Long Island, and his neighbor was a former NYC police captain who had employed this strategy to great effect.) Additionally, in places like Texas many cops can make more money on the side by moonlighting as armed security. Claude informs me that pay can be anywhere from 25/hr in the worst case, to 150/hr in the best, with 60/hr being typical, which is not bad for what is often just sitting around and watching a concert.
Cops also have excellent insurance and protection for any eventuality. Unlike a civilian or a private security guard, an on-duty cop can know with certainty that any medical expenses incurred will be covered, that disability payments will be generous and indefinitely provided, and that in the worst case, their family will be looked after. The family of a cop killed in the line of duty receives: a one time tax free $420,000 federal pay out, typically the full pension of the dead cop (until death or remarriage of the surviving spouse), as well as department life insurance and additional support from state programs (child subsidies, tuition assistance, state payouts—Texas gives the surviving spouse another 500k!) and private charitable orgs. Basically, society has set things up so that it is fairly easy for a cop to make the heroic decision.
So I don't find the Uvalde officers sympathetic. They took respected, well compensated positions in their community that came with a small condition: a tiny chance that they might actually have to be heroes, rather than just collect the respect and the pay for it. And they failed. I understand it can often be hard to truly know how one might behave in a situation where death is a possible outcome, but I want cops to be composed of the small fraction of the population that doesn't have a hard time answering this question. And in the event a cop that is unlucky enough to be tested finds he made a good faith mistake about his tolerance for danger, I want him to act anyway, because to not do so is incredibly corrosive to the institution of policing and to society at large.
Cowards look at the Uvalde incident and now tell themselves, "hey, I can be a police officer, and in the worse case, if it gets scary, I can just hide." In so doing, they steal the resources society has apportioned to support a warrior, as well as the equipment, the training and the badge. Citizens post Uvalde will look at the police and feel less respect, reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement, the quality of recruits, and the safety of the community. Society is coarsened more generally when the people who are entrusted to "serve and protect" others behave in such a flagrantly selfish manner. Many will look at the low standard set by the Uvalde officers and feel comfortable setting an even lower standard for themselves: "If the police, with their insurance and pensions and line-of-duty death protections can sit by and watch a bunch of little kids get murdered, why should I bother to take the slightest risk to help somebody else?" This is all unacceptable; there need to be consequences.
What consequences? In another time, perhaps shame could have sufficed. But we live in a shameless, atomized society with a lot of mobility, so I don't think shame will do. Instead, I think legal consequences were required: consequences of the sort that would clear out the cowards who know themselves to be cowards and who are currently wearing a badge; consequences that would drive the coward police officers who don't know they are cowards into gunfire, should such a situation arise, because the alternative of hiding would be still more frightening; consequences that would make it clear to citizens that the moral bar for everyone is much, much higher than what happened in Uvalde. For me, it is not about extracting revenge or making the Uvalde officers suffer (I honestly feel badly for them, and I'd personally treat them with a measure of kindness); rather, it's about excising a dangerous rot before it has a chance to spread.
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