I dont believe its a fact that criminals need to get payed more mainly because the criminal side is working fine, if you cant cook go hit chops if you cant do that then do a legal job for money the worrying factor for me is that theres an imbalance between the loss of a criminal and the loss of a police officer. For example A criminal is in a shootout cops roll up and they get involved, they will all have body armour .50's shotguns and or smgs a criminal might have the same but when the crim dies he will be losing a car and guns but what does an officer lose nothing they just wait 30 minutes and then go back on duty. The main point is the criminal side does not need to be changed but the PD side does there needs to be something in place so that there is more of a loss for an officer so it adds an incentive to not go into danger im not sure what the best loss is but it should be something among the lines of if they die they have to pay the department for the equipment they lost.
Cheers for taking your time to hear me out.