PD suffers from the same view angle. A lot of us water down our roleplay to match the average community member.
Volunteers shouldn't even have guns in my opinion.
And as for firing officers, getting fired in this department is really easy, a lot of you however never report an officer ICly. Unlawful discharge of weaponry is attempted murder and it gets you fired.
Who in their right mind would even get arrested with active felonies? Why not just open fire on 5 incoming officers and then spam /do is dead, so you don't get revived.
The right way to go about it, is to reward the player for staying alive. Criminals that stay alive for a week, get notoriety bonuses such as selling drugs at higher prices, making syringes/joints with less ingredients, smuggle gain boost, ((debatable : health 20% resistance, notorious criminals are harder to kill by a small margin))
If you want to punish the player for dying you will get nowhere, as you would need to make the punishment really severe before a player could feel it. Making it really severe would impact the player experience of lawful players that have a high mortality rate as a part of their job.
I think this suggestion might prove useful in the light of a similar suggestion posted by @LocMax