Why don't the police in the US arm their officers instead with rubber or plastic bullets? ?

Why do we focus on just the one consequence of our actions? Prior to the incident where the cop uses a weapon there were countless other incidents. Because those incidents exist is why I need a gun. Healing a society that chooses to kill and violate doesn't start with the final consequence of their actions. Police are janitors at best, they clean up our messes.

85% of youth in prison are from fatherless homes. What can we do to stop decades of criminal behaviour that lead to a bullet? Do these youths become adults eventually? There is no way to repair a leaky roof with buckets, you must climb up there and swing a hammer.

A bullet at the beginning of these kids lives would do more good that a lack of a bullet at the end! Otherwise bullets are irrelevant, too little too late. 

A friend just moved away. He realized that the key to living among these people isn't the balls to kill them if needed but the strenght to live with himself afterwards. He left his custom built home that he planned to live in forever and went somewhere quieter to start over. Why does society force this choice and encourage rubber bullets but not an answer?

Instead of complaining the house isn't clean enough I find myself cleaning up after myself. My wife isn't my janitor, that's 1950s ideology, we've progressed beyond that. 

As a man, part of society, I know what my responsibility in this. To raise my children and to mentor others. There is no easy answer, no pass the buck, no projection of responsibility. Perhaps the biggest problem in that our society has this idea that someone else, like the police, can fix us. 

Right, so we can have more dead cops and less dead criminals eh. That makes a whole lot of sense.

The police tried what's called a parachute bullet many years ago. That's a bullet made of lead and gallium it allows a person to get shot. And received the full impact of a 45 bullet.

Which will render you completely unable to resist.

But it only enters your body about an inch before it totally flattens as if it was tin foil.

As I said law enforcement tried that.  And they found out that when people knew that the police were using non-lethal bullets the criminals lost all fear of resisting arrest.

They knew the police had non-lethal weapons and so the criminals. Did everything in their power to escape and to disable the police to keep from being caught.

There is this thing called fear of lethal Force the fear that if you screw up you're going to get shot dead that is quite a deterrent when you're afraid of death you don't screw up as bad

For riot control, they did switch them out to the non lethal rubber bullets, but they too were too much for those that tend to support the violence. If you are talking about everyday policing, the bad guys already have the edge in fire power.  Oh we hear all about the mass shootings and when a cop shoots someone. But more cops are actually shot then they shoot every year. The daily one off shootings that happen make up the vast majority of gun deaths. We hear all over the place the actuly very small % of shootings, and the ones we do hear about are the cops bad, bad guys good.

It's because the bad guys are using real bullets and the cops want a fair chance at staying alive.

Why isn't the media forthcoming about statistics and what the police have to deal with every day? 

There are 700,000 police officers in the United States.

They are involved in 2.8 million interactions with potential suspects every day.

In one year, this means there are 1 billion potential situations for things to really get out of control.

What are we focusing on?  The half a dozen bad situations per year where cops screw up and an unarmed person dies, and even then, some are debatable. 

This is 0.000000006% of interactions, so unlikely that it doesn't remotely deserve the type of scorn that it sets up.  More children are killed by drunk drivers every hour of every day. 

Oh, and about your question, you have no idea what you are talking about.  You ever go up against an armed drug addict who is strung out?  Watched 12 rounds from a 9mm go center mass and he was still able to make it to the officer and stab her in the arm, so don't go on about "rubber" or "plastic bullets", maybe realize that our police officers are doing a wonderful job and getting no thanks from you scumbags. 

To argue over what kind of ammunition the cops should use is creating an issue out of what amounts to a red herring.  You miss the entire point of what's wrong here, which is the whole culture of the relationship between police departments and the communities they're supposed to be "protecting and serving."  A change in culture is needed, NOT a different kind of  ammunition.

It  would go a long way if policing within a given community was by officers who come from and LIVE IN that community.  You have some patrolman who is working an inner city precinct who's home is 30 miles away in some lilly-white suburb--what the hell incentive is he going to have to view his beat as anything other than the equivalent of a combat tour against the "enemy?"  I guarantee you it'd be different if the people he sees every day on the job are his neighbors.

What's been going on here with cops is not unlike what's been going on in places like China and Burma--where the powers that be deliberately send troops from outside provinces into the cities--city dwellers are alien to them and so they see them as less than human.  The result is the same.