I agree with a lot of this in principle, but there are additional factors at play when it comes to police scheduling and deployment. Serious crime isn't evenly

I agree with a lot of this in principle, but there are additional factors at play when it comes to police scheduling and deployment. Serious crime isn't evenly distributed over time, so a police force has to have enough armed officers available on duty to handle spikes in demand. Statistical modelling is getting better, but the failure scenario here of "oh sorry, we couldn't respond to your home invasion for an hour because we were busy" is absolutely unacceptable to the general population. Here's an example of this, where the police were pilloried by the media (https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/intruder-with-knife-boy-being-held-no-portland-police-response-for-1-hour-36-minutes.html https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/intruder-with-knife...). On a typical quiet day though, those officers will end up handling lower severity incidents to keep busy, by taking statements, directing traffic, etc. Just like all redundancy, this looks wasteful until you suddenly need it in a low probability event.