This is a very rosy presentation of police work, it's hard to believe you've known many police who felt comfortable enough to open up about the pitfalls of their work.

>Pays well
Not for the amount of danger and emotional baggage involved.

> Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges.
> Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation

Which is why you will frequently be following established procedures relevant to the situation at hand and deviating from procedure will often be frowned upon without a defensible reason. Further, you'll often have to suppress your insight because of political reasons. Police frequently know in advance what places are gang hangouts and who's selling drugs or sex, but having the information and having it collected in a format you're allowed to act on are different matters (and that's before getting into whether you're even allowed to try and collect that information).

>Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes.

This is just a progressive way of saying "High tolerance for eating other peoples shit while staying focused on doing your job." There is almost never a real 'resolution' to a domestic dispute for example, there's you getting screamed at and threatened not only by an abuser but also by their victim who will probably lie on their behalf because it was a neighbor who made the call. Then, if nothing immediately actionable is happening, you get to leave for the third time in a week after making a few notes and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not doing anything again.

>Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive.

Being a cop earns you hero points with some groups but in the mainstream will get you villified or at least distrusted. Worse, you will often see people advocating procedural changes in that either increase your personal risk (as if they have a bottomless resevoir of disposable LEOs available) or which reduce your ability to police effectively (but they'll still criticize you for failing to clean up problem neighborhoods). This is a major factor behind why police and their unions almost always stand by each other even when it looks bad, because the public will often demand you fall on a sword or turn on you the instant your optics leave even a little room for doubt.

>On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force.

Rare exceptions aside, smart people realize the risk isn't worth the reward and emotionally intelligent people realize the job frequently destroys LEOs emotionally. Both groups likely believe that the job is important for a functional society if they're not blinded by cynicism but they'll also understand that the majority of their energy is going to be spent primarily on dealing with beuracracy, paperwork, and simply enduring the situations they'll be placed into. This is far from catnip for these people.

>It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.

This is attitude is another reason people who can do the math decide not to be police or cease being police. Because people assume most cops ("the system") in the present are just meat heads. But if you try to introduce tech-centric solutions, like cameras, to cut down on the number of necessary meat heads in an area you get accused of trying to create a dystopian surveillance apparatus. If you try to explain why a proposed change is a bad idea you get accused of everything from being racist to being a sadist who just likes how easily you can abuse the current system. And if you implement new sensitivity policies the public forgets within five minutes anyway because a cop in a totally different part of the country did something bad. This isn't to say that no cop enjoys their work or finds it worth it, but the idea that there's a massive untapped market of uber cops being kept away because of the old guard is just wishful thinking that holds appeal because it makes the problem seem much simpler than it is.