Sorry, but the cops lost that trust from me when the started sending swat teams and abusing power way to much. Since then, to me calling the cops has become a last resort. I dont trust ANY of them because of the few aholes that are abusing their power. Mainly caused because of their policies of shutting up and protecting each others. Until they fix this, i will not trust ANY cop again.
In my life I've experienced 2 burglaries, 3 vehicle vandalisms, and one time I was seriously assaulted in a beach town by 10 guys with a gun. In every one of those experiences, the police were unprofessional and completely useless.
I will still call the police in the future, but just so they can fill out a police report for insurance claims or potential law suits. Other than that, I don't expect the police to do anything unless they were on the scene and saw somebody break the law.
And even then, one of the times when my car was vandalized, the cops were there and they filed a police report and told me to try to figure out who will pay between the two dudes that jumped on my car and if that doesn't work, give the officer a call and he will help me with the next steps. Obviously those guys didn't wanna pay so I tried to get in touch with that cop and he was avoiding my calls. I called over 10 times over the course of a couple weeks and he was never there and never returned my calls.
Another time my neighbor was throwing eggs at my motorcycle for 3 nights in a row and I got him on video, call the cops and they come by about 12 hours later and just laughed at the video, and then all of a sudden got a call to something more important and bounced. It may seem funny, but me having to pay someone $300 to clean egg out of all of the fairings and tubing is not funny. At the very least, do your job and file a fucking police report.
I'm not sure how this would make calgoo change his mind.
* Cops are under no obligation to go into harms way to protect the public.
* Cops primarily exist to collect evidence for prosecution after the fact.
* Just because criminals and crimes exist doesn't take away from cops' bad behavior.
* If calgoo becomes the victim of a crime, cops are unlikely to be able to make him whole again - for bodily injury, prosecution of the perpretrator can't restore his body or life - for property damage or theft, police usually can't be bothered with the small stuff.
There are problems with power and corruption.... But
Have you seen what happens to communities when police withdraw? They become overrun by gangs and other less accountable organizations.
Even favelas where cops act paramilitarily, say in Caracas, people still want cops because no cops is usually worse, unless you get a private version of cops, which is essentially cops by another name.
Not to disagree with you, but to add a data point (or rather an anecdote) - I heard a few people from Moscow claiming that they're more afraid of cops than criminals.
(Of course, even if it's not an exaggeration and even if it reflects the actual probabilities of getting hurt by cops and criminals there, it does not follow that things wouldn't be even worse without a police force.)
I fail to see how that bears any relevance to anything I stated. Not that I necessarily fully disagree with your sentiment, but you're presenting a related yet different topic.