Why is the amount of training for police officers in the United States so low compared to other developed countries?

Question

In the wake of current events the U.S. police have once again come under immense public scrutiny, putting the focus on various aspects such as police brutality, racial discrimination, qualified immunity, police unions and others.
There is however one aspect that I would consider to be a HUGE elephant in the room, which is the amount of training that police officers in the United States receive:

I am from Germany. Over here we have significantly less crime than the U.S., less gun violence, less organized crime, less gang violence, or, to get to the point: The job of a police officer in Germany is significantly easier than the job of a police officer in the U.S., who has to deal with far more dangerous and complex situations and issues on an average basis.
Yet over here we consider the bare minimum amount of training a police officer requires to be two years (in my home state even three years), which seems to be the norm in developed countries, whereas in the U.S. the average seems to be between 20 and 30 weeks, or roughly 600 hours.

I cannot emphasize enough how insane this fact alone appears from my perspective let alone the fact that this isn't the primary issue of the current debate.
It seems perfectly obvious to me that this state of affairs is a recipe for disaster, considering that it means that U.S. police officers are sent into complex situations while having only between one quarter or one eighth of the training that other developed countries are providing their respective officers.

My primary question therefore is: Why is the amount of police training so much lower in the U.S. than in other developed countries?

Furthermore, if you want to go into detail, I would also be interested in why this doesn't seem to be even closely as big of an issue in public discourse as one would expect it to be.

Edit:

A comprehensive comparison between a great amount of countries is surprisingly hard to find, or rather was impossible to find for me. Therefore I looked at the specific information with regard to various north-western european countries (U.K., Germany, Scandinavia...), because they are the most comparable to the U.S. in terms of national development level. Examples for this would be Germany, Sweden and U.K..
Overall in the north-western European region the predominant model seems to be at least 2 years of training, more likely 3 and usually modeled after a bachelor-master-system.

Answer 1

A large part of the reason that training in the US is so short compared to other developed countries appears to be that the training in the US seems to focus more on the practical aspects of the job, rather than the social or ethical aspects. This Axios article contains comments from a Professor of Sociology:

Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland, who leads implicit bias training for police departments and the military, notes that "police departments do a lot of tactical training. They don’t do a lot of training that is focused on social interaction. ... But nine out of 10 times, or even more, their job is simply having a conversation."

In other developed countries, this seems to be the focus of a large proportion of training. If we look, for example, at the Norwegian police academy, Politihøgskolen, there is a breakdown of the three-year basic training course. If we look just at the first year of study, we see modules including "Preventive police work", "Police, society and ethics", "Criminal law and criminal procedure". This training, however, does not neglect practical skills - a large proportion of the training is "Operational police work", but in the first year, this is limited to first aid, arrest technique, and the use of pepper spray & batons. It is not until the final year of study that this includes the use of one-handed and two-handed weapons.

One explanation for this is the lack of federal standards on police training - according to the Department of Justice, there are 'more than 18,000 local police departments in the U.S." but there's no "universal standard for the structure, size, or governance of police departments".

A second explanation is that although the classroom training in the US is relatively short, a large proportion of police training is carried out 'on the job'. This is not true across the board, for the reason stated in the previous paragraph, but if we take the example of California, police officers first have to undergo a Regular Basic Course with a minimum requirement of 664 hours.

The next stage is then a Field Training Program, where new officers are assigned to an experienced officer on the job, the aim being to introduce the new officer to "personnel, procedures, policies, and purposes of the individual law enforcement department" and to provide "the initial formal and informal training specific to the department and the day-to-day duties of its officers". This lasts a minimum of 10 weeks, but usually 12-16 weeks.

The final stage is then a probationary period of 12-24 months before being considered a fully qualified police officer. In total, then, the stages of training sum to a level which is roughly similar to the training criteria undertaken in comparable countries.

The main reasons for the disparity, then, seem to be a focus on in-field training, compared to classroom learning, which skews the figures, as well as a lack of national regulatory standards, allowing individual states and departments to lower standards when faced with recruitment pressures.

Answer 2

Citizens of the United States pay some of the lowest tax rates in the world, for top-tier (economically) nations. And yet they/we are constantly complaining about being "taxed to death."

So we chose to focus on a simple measure of tax burden: national-level income taxes plus mandatory social-insurance contributions as a percentage of gross income. We calculated this for four different families: a single employed person with no children; two types of married couples with two children, one with both parents working and the other with one worker; and a single working parent with two children. In all cases, the U.S. was below the 39-nation average – in some cases, well below.

Pew Research: Among developed nations, Americans’ tax bills are below average

Tax Policy Center: How do US taxes compare internationally?

Training police costs money. More training is going to cost more. More highly qualified officers, before training, would also demand a higher salary. Once having received a higher level of training, officers would also probably command a higher salary than the current status quo.

All of that costs tax money. Americans are notoriously cheap and short-term focused.