We once had a purse stolen out of a car (our bad, shouldn't have been left out there, and we left the car unlocked, total fuckup on our part).
A credit card from it was used twice at a gas station (cameras galore) that is not near anything—except it's the last gas station on the route to the local, rural-located (little other reason to be out there) Amazon distribution center. We lived in a typical dead-end shitty suburban neighborhood where nobody ever passes through who doesn't live there, except delivery drivers. It was an Amazon delivery driver who stole it, I'm not even Sherlock Holmes and I figured that out in about two minutes with one CC statement and a Maps search.
The cops took a report, didn't give a fuck about the fact that it'd almost certainly take take comically little work to catch the perp and informed us they didn't intend to even try, then... fucking charged us for a copy of the police report we needed for the CC companies.
Definitely didn't feel protected, and only "served" in the sense of "you got served!"
I can only assume resistance to the "defund the police" movement comes entirely from people who've never dealt with them. Ok, our issue was pretty minor, sure it was about the easiest damn case to investigate in all of history but they only have so many people—but I've got a half-dozen other stories like that, from employers, relatives, and friends, and they're all the same, even with much bigger-ticket and serial(!) thefts. They're completely useless, the amount I'm happy to pay them unless they significantly improve is zero dollars. That's before even factoring in their fucked-up "warrior culture", normalized rampant civil rights violations, and lots of murders. Like, putting aside the abuse, they're just goddamn useless at their supposed primary function.