As an extreme case re: your point, OP mentions students who were actually setting stuff on fire at their school. Why the heck is police not getting involved at that point? We're talking actual, serious criminal behavior that can also be predictive of further crimes later in life if unaddressed, so some very real consequences are definitely called for, to try and set these kids straight. An ounce of prevention can save a pound of cure.

We had kids regularly setting trash cans on fire in my school. Police got involved sometimes (we had an officer on campus at all times). Those kids definitely received consequences, and they would be put into programs to help turn their lives around, but it did them no good. Just further cemented their fate. A good 20% of the school of about 2,000 kids were way beyond help. The parents, their home life, and the kid's upbringing are really the issue here. The school can't do anything about that. I always felt so bad for the teachers, the abuse they had to put up with was something nobody should go through.

This right here is the thing that nobody wants to say but is just true.

I had some good friends in high school (a large, below-average public school in CA) who were solidly middle class or better, had supportive parents, and were just shitheads when it came to education. They were disruptive in class, didn't do homework and just generally didn't care.

I'm all for giving kids who are struggling the benefit of the doubt and trying to help them, but if they don't want that help, at some point you have to weigh the cost of trying to force it on them against the cost of wasting the time of the students who are actually there to learn.