It's less about compassion and more about risk. Risk in the sense of the physical danger an officer goes into, but also in the sense that we are removing protections for the officer and holding them to a higher standard.
We can assume x% of applicants are actually qualified, instead of "Good enough and we need bodies". If we increase pay, we increase total applicants - which, assuming x stays constant, means we end up with more actually qualified cops.
Judging from this thread full of compassionate people, it's pretty clear to me that they should be the ones being cops, and not the current cops.
So we should compensate cops the equivalent salary of a software developer, to create incentives for a career change, and then we can train former cops as software developers. We might end up with more bugs in software, but at least there will not be any police abuse any more.