Bad Police System?

I started my first playthrough recently since I've finally got a CPU that can run the game well and I've run into my first major gripe with the game. What's up with the police? I've had multiple occasions now where I've randomly gotten a wanted level and been attacked. In one case, I was clearing out an assault in progress thing. In another, I had the maelstrom randomly show up and attack me in the street, and I fired back at them. I didn't hit even hit a civilian or a cop in either case, yet I still got a wanted level and police drove in and started attacking me alongside the actual criminals.

Is this seriously just how they're programmed? It's extremely disruptive for immersion. The game tells me that the NCPD do absolutely nothing to stop crimes, yet it completely contradicts itself in gameplay in a way that doesn't add anything positive. It's especially annoying since they'll attack me for firing a gun, but they'll entirely ignore the attacking gang members who are doing the exact same thing. If they attacked the NPCs too, it might've at least been possible to come up with a way to rationalize it and save my immersion, but they don't. The game would unironically be more immersive if they removed the police system altogether.