Why are cops in cities terrible?
Is it because of bad apples? ( Maybe, but even good cops still do jerk things)
Is it because they have a lot of legal protection for bad behavior (maybe, but in the US you can get some restitution, and they can get punished)
It's really because police are just giant revenue generating machines for the city.
In order for a police officer to advance in his career, he is measured by the number of citations, summons, and arrests he has achieved.
And if performance is based on the number of bad things happening in your area, all of a sudden you see bad things happening everywhere.
A police officer does not get promoted for the number of old ladies he or she helps cross the street, the number of kittens retrieved from trees, or having effective patrols that result in zero incidences. They only get promoted for getting the high stats of bad actions.
And if police departments institute quotas, then you feel compelled to find a sucker (usually a minority or poor person because they lack the resources to fight back) to harass and induce them to break a minor infraction to get them into the station or write a citation.

Take away the performance metric of citations, summons and arrests, and you will have a much better police force who is delegated to truly being servants of the community rather than the rich and powerful.

"...other translated inscriptions turned out to be playful taunts at the person doing the decoding."

Remember to drink your ovaltine!

While Bill Gates and others may talk about the declining state of education, there is a real movement by conservatives to use public money that funds education to enrich those who teach, by privatizing schools.

The Common Core is a strategy to standardize the curriculum across all the 50 states (which isn't a bad idea) but the people who write the standards and create the tests don't have our best interests at heart. By creating ludicrous tests, they are going to "prove" that the US students are failing terribly, especially those in public schools. Then there will be demands of reform, where they will promote pseudo public schools that use public funds ran in a for profit manner.

Once that happens, education which should not be a for profit enterprise, would be transformed into private enterprises that uses public funds to enrich companies like Pearson, Amplify, Thompson, etc.

The Japanese call people who forget how to write characters "waa puro baka" which is a short way to say "Word Processor Idiocy".
However, even if today's youth are forgetting how to write on paper; the Japanese government has decided to revise the list of kanji Japanese citizens must learn to be considered literate. Thanks to IME's (input method editors) Japanese are starting to use hard to write Kanji more and more thanks to modern input systems.