- misgendering tweets are more important than unexplained deaths
- police would be less starved if they allocated their priorities better
I think it’s fair to call your second bullet point a ‘hot take’. Police funding was hit hard by austerity and the effects of that are still with us. It’s not credible or evidence-based to attribute the overall shortage of resources to overpolicing of tweets (however annoying and stupid that may be considered in itself).
And while you're correct that the article you linked is a bullshit waste of time, it probably represents around .005% of the forces allotted time in a year.
There is no big gotcha here, other than the reality that politics is a part of policing.
Using a software dev analogy. It's like each case is a feature ticket, and then constantly grooming the backlog so any feature related to say "GDPR" is marked as too-large and pushed to the bottom.
Rather, case-files should be completed FIFO with very clear rules and thresholds for when it can't be meaningfully resolved. Same goes for prosecutorial discretion.
In summation, commentary from my side: "WTF is wrong with these people, I'm surprised society hasn't fallen apart."
The UK is going to fall apart because the level of corruption has reached the scale that nobody who's competent and prepared to do a good job (i.e. moral people who see doing a good and thorough job as a core value) wants to put up with it any more. It's too visible.
I studied Computer Science in the UK and the very first job I got (in central London providing service to names you'd certainly recognise) was with this absolute cowboy outfit managed service provider that was providing about 1/4 of the services it claimed to provide. Backups? Yes, you're getting billed for them, no, they aren't happening. Hot spares? See above. Redundancy? See above. On call? See above. The lying was endemic and it was gross. I developed a chronic drinking problem while working there and I really do think working/being in an atmosphere of bullshit affects you in some sort of karmic way.
The UK is going to fail if they don't drastically change trajectory because everyone who isn't gross is going to leave, and the tap of infinite numbers of exploitable Poles has been turned off.