https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243982287/fbi-agents-housing-costs
"There are multiple stressors that folks experience," said Caroline Otto, assistant director of the FBI's Resource Planning office. "We have heard very compelling and heart-wrenching stories across the workforce in these areas."
Have they tried not eating food?
Yeah maybe they'll be traitors in some hypothetical future where their masters stop funding them or they're facing the threat of organized masses. To be a pig in current day America you have to be either clueless or a entity constructed out of raw, vibrating racism. Neither of which is gonna work for us.
I do uphold the current idea that police recruitment rates right now are so shit because of political organizing, especially since 2020. People despise cops now. People who want to be cops want respect, or like you said, they're undisciplined cowards and don't want to face a public who actively hates them.