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  • In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, the police refuse to deal with "freaky WOOF! going down at the cemetery" and make the mayor take care of it instead. But not because the mayor is a main character and the police aren't...nope. The rest of the times they really ought to be doing something, the police don't even offer an excuse.
    (While the titular doctor is battling someone with Paul Bunyan's disease)
    Policeman: This looks bad. All right, prepare to open fire.
    Yoshi the Raptor: RAAAATCH!
    Gordito: Hold your fire. Give him a chance.
    Policeman: Okay, forget this. I don't do dinosaurs.
    Alt Text: Ninjas, zombies, giant lumberjacks, SURE. I signed up for that! But I draw the line at dinosaurs.
  • Ansem Retort: the police have been muzzled by a state law that all crimes committed by people on TV are ignored to protect the entertainment business. Notably, the closest Axel came to being actually punished for his many, many crimes against humanity was before he was on TV.
  • In Bitmap World, the security guards at Macrohard stand around doing nothing while equipment is being stolen, then complain that they might get hurt when they're sent to take care of it.
  • In the Ciem Webcomic Series , the police are either pathetically incompetent or else actively working for the villains.
  • Daisy Owl tackles this one:
    Daisy: This isn't like [dad] at all. We need to go find him.
    Cooper: Shouldn't we call the police?
    Daisy: Yeah, sure. And then we can have ice cream with a nice lady from the DSS. And she'll ask us why Daddy's not home, and why he's an owl, and why he doesn't wear pants, and so on.
  • cool and new web comic has Femorafreack the police officer. While he does have moments of badassery, he is terrible at his job. Best exemplified in this page, where he comes across a gigantic blood trail that Jhon caused:
  • Every example of the police in Drugs And Kisses, much to the delight of the main characters.
  • In El Goonish Shive, the cops are rarely of any help with the paranormal activity that occurs in Moperville. Mall cops especially so.
  • Subverted in Girly. The C.P.D. even outdo the actual superhero most of the time, not that that's very hard. In the later arcs, they're practically a Badass Army.
  • The Guy Upstairs: None of the police that Rozy talks to believe her, in part because of the lack of evidence of Adam’s crimes. It’s also revealed that aside from Alex, most of the police officers are crooked.
  • The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! has two local cops named Baskin and Robbin (as opposed to the two recurring federal agents, Ben and Jerry) who diligently ignore all the seemingly nonsensical "crank calls" they keep getting about flying saucers, unicorns, dragons, robots, and the like. Like so.
  • Joe vs. Elan School: After Joe is recaptured and on his way back to Elan School, the goons who recaptured him stop at a gas station. Joe screams at a nearby state trooper that he's being kidnapped. When the trooper comes over to investigate, the goons namedrop Elan owner Jay Cirri, and the trooper is immediately frightened into letting them go.
  • In #Killstagram, cops come to Remi's door because her friend Jia has been missing for two days. Remi says she got texts from Jia the night before asking for Remi's address, hands over her phone, and says someone tried to break in last night. The homicide cop sees all the social media Like notifications, lectures Remi on her social media addiction, tells her about infuencer-targeting kidnappernote  instead of caring about the obvious clue, says the break-in should be reported to another department, and continues to lecture her about leaking her personal info online. If nothing else, the cops should check the cell towers Jia's phone pinged. And this is a story set in and created by someone from South Korea, where the cops do that sort of thing all the time. The scene ends after the lecture, with no evidence the cop cared about the clues at any point, even if his priorities were in the wrong order.
    • Also, when Remi opened the door for the cops, she said "Thank God you're here!" and none of the three cops outside asked her about that, apparently. They just told her about Jia's disappearance, then we cut to the station.
  • Played with in Kiwi Blitz, as a kid Reed Bahia's mother explained that the police were always useless in the stories to make things more interesting for the hero. And now in the present day the police don't have a big enough budget to deal with all of the costumed villains running around.
  • Latchkey Kingdom zig-zags this regarding Rex, the Police Marshall/only officer. In "Usurped", he's portrayed as too lazy to prevent the king from being usurped right in front of him, but later on, he's shown as highly effective at dealing with crooks and proactive with finding people lost in the Weird Woods. Perhaps it's just an instance of Early-Installment Weirdness.
  • In Mayonaka Densha whenever the police show up they only serve to make the situation worse or just don't do anything at all. Then again, they are being lead by the man himself, Inspector Lestrade.
  • If you consider teachers to be the police on a school playground, Ozy and Millie has an example of this. In one storyline, Millie is repeatedly pushed into a mud puddle by the local bully, and the nearby teacher does nothing in response. But when Millie snaps and hits the bully in retaliation, the teacher is immediately there to punish her.
  • In Rasputin Catamite, The local police seems lazy, adverse to paperwork, hideously bigoted and corrupt.
  • Rezz & Co Bounty Hunters: The Galachron Peace Keepers are an organization tasked with enforcing the law in an entire solar system, but use a bad IVR system that lands the protagonists in jail along with the actual criminal.
  • In Schlock Mercenary, this trope was played straight (and mercilessly lampshaded) with the police during the 2005 Schlocktober arc. In the aftermath of the short arc, the heroes' lawyer manages to get all charges for their handful of less-than-legal actions dropped by threatening the cops with a bundle of legitimate lawsuits, "including false arrest, dereliction of duty, excessive force, and incompetence. I like to think of it as the 'impersonating a police force suit.'"
  • Sequential Art got Art who despite repeated cases of Cassandra Truth didn't learn and still tried to call the police whenever something wrong happens. Later, Pip mocked him for still trying.
  • In Shortpacked!, Ethan calls 911 after his Roadblock poster and Roadblock action figure start sexually harassing him. He gets hung up on almost immediately, as you might expect.
  • In Sluggy Freelance the two-man police force in Podunkton actively discourages people from reporting crimes. Deputy Edsel is a straight example, whose first response in the face of an emergency is to say “Somebody should call the police!" Officer Tod, however, is actually quite skilled, but he prefers to just let Oasis chop criminals into little pieces, while he gets paid for doing absolutely nothing.
    • When Zoë tries to tell some apparently less dishonest policemen that she was kidnapped into a building that turned into a rampaging ground for "zombgeeks" (don't ask), she runs into a downright parodic version of the trope. Sure, her story is extremely implausible, but the policemen are also ignoring the fact that when they went to check it out, "a rocketship made of mucus and unidentifiable bits burst through the roof." Apparently they thought this wasn't anything unexpected because "it's a Monday."
  • Suicide for Hire; the cops never seem to get anywhere. A rash of gruesome teen deaths goes unheralded by the news and not investigated in any detail, and acts of violence in public go ignored, such as when Autumn pulls a knife and attacks another girl at the prom. They did respond and do their best to deal with a case of domestic violence (the author of the comic has been trained to work with victims of domestic violence and didn't want to make light of it) but the victim's non-compliance meant they couldn't convict the attacker.
  • Supercrash: Police of Norandopolis (the setting of the series) aren't very fond of superheroes and treat them with utter disdain despite clearly not being equipped to handle most of the threats to the city such as monsters. Granted in Oliver (a.k.a Supercrash)'s first encounter with them, they did catch a thief and arrested Oliver alongside him when the thief tried to claim him as an accomplice (didn't help that Oliver mistook him for a fellow hero). While they let Oliver go, it wasn't without humiliation via forcing him to dance while they shot at his feet. In the second encounter, however, Oliver tries to get them to help Jennifer after she faints from having to defend herself against her henchgirls who rebelled on her, but all they do is mock him for forgetting to bring in her assailants and laugh in his face, forcing him to carry Jennifer out of their HQ in a huff.
  • Averted in (x, why?) where the police manage to do there job here and here.
  • unOrdinary: The Authorities talk a good talk but don't seem to actually care about anything unless they see it as a threat to the hierarchy which keeps them in power, to which their response is to have their agents disguise themselves and murder those who aren't acting properly in their place and then frame it as a killing done by criminals the Authorities are investigating.
  • In the Web Comic ''Zeera the Space Pirate,'' Zeera at one point tries to go straight and joins the space cops, only to discover that the space police are so corrupt that piracy was actually a more honest career choice, and she reverts to being a pirate. Since then, she has met a few cops who are honest and are trying to reform the organization.


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