Police Are Useless / Web Original

---

• Bee and Puppycat: While Bee is waiting to cross the street, two police in a cop car drives to the intersection and stops to glare at her to make sure she doesn't jaywalk while ignoring two kids running across the street to chase a duck.
• Discussed frequently in the True Crime episodes of BuzzFeed Unsolved. A lot of the unsolved cases had their investigations bogged down by Dirty Cops, incompetent officials, and people who just straight-up didn't do their jobs correctly. A lot of the series' scarier episodes are unnerving not just because of the grisly nature of the crimes, but because of how many families and friends of the victims will most likely never see justice because of the neglect of the people who were supposed to help.
• If they were living in reality and not a Rule of Funny psycho-world, most of Channel Awesome would have been in jail or mental homes by now. Specific examples would be Chester A. Bum and Ask That Guy with the Glasses, as they can get out of any trouble by using the insanity defense. The James and the Giant Peach review did open with the reveal that the Critic was serving time in the "Internet State Penitentiary"... for doing a really bad Let's Play.
• Cracked:
  • One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that police cars in a Beat 'em Up are just for decoration. "Only trust your fists; police will never help you."
  • "7 Great Occupations for Horribly Stupid People" by Seanbaby lists cops in sci-fi at #5. They're absolutely useless when something supernatural or sci-fi-esque is happening because they're unwilling to accept what's going on even when it's the most rational explanation.
  • One episode of After Hours discussed this, with Katie's irrational hatred (and confused slurs) towards police was caused by this trope's prevalence in movies.
• The police in the GoAnimate Grounded videos seem to have something of a Hair-Trigger Temper, as they will instantly peg a character with jailtime for littering if they so much as walk up to a piece of paper on the ground. Other times, they just outright arrest people for little to no reason or show a bias towards the trouble-making kids' parents (or basically anyone but the trouble-makers for that matter), sometimes even arresting the kids just for talking to them. Outside of that, the police will instantly come to arrest someone if they are simply asked to without complaint, even if they are being called to arrest a kid for smashing their sibling's iPod.
• Subverted in the Homestar Runner cartoon literally called "The Strong Bad is in Jail Cartoon", which begins with Strong Bad and the Cheat being caught by the "police" (or more accurately, Homestar doing a poor imitation of a police siren) and arrested. He then escapes from a literal Cardboard Prison and attempts to kidnap the Poopsmith, but once again the "police" (which includes Homestar, Bubs, and Coach Z) manage to easily recapture him.
• The Last Podcast on the Left:
  • Whenever police incompotence comes up, the hosts often call them "The Hot Dog Squad" after the Whichita PD taskforce that spent years unable to get the first clue to the identity of the BTK, which also spawned the once recurring character Detective Popcorn, a sentient bag of popcorn who is just too deliscious to solve any crimes.
  • The hosts often note times when police ineffectiveness is a major factor in how long a serial killer goes without getting caught. For example, in the Dean Coril series, they note the Huston police were underfunded and understaffed so much that, as a result, they actively avoided investigating things like homicides and shut down a victim's family when they provided a letter written by their missing son that they suspect was faked, but which Missing Persons took as evidence he was no longer missing.
  • They also note occasions when a killer was caught by dumb luck or mistakes rather than anything police did. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, for instance, were only found out when Lake was held for questioning for an act of compulsive shoplifting by Ng. Lake was then linked to multiple missing persons, starting the chain of events that led to Lake committing suicide in custody and Ng being arrested and convicted.
  • Another issue the hosts bring up frequently is the fact that police precincts never speak to one another regarding local crimes, which causes killers to go on longer than if they just pooled information. This is understandable in the case of drifter killers whose crimes take place entire states apart or in times when long distance communication was not the norm. It's less so in the case of the Boston Strangler, in the 1960s, when police and district attorneys within the same city kept information to themselves in the hopes of being the ones who will crack the case.
  • Marcus Parks gets especially worked up in the second Robert Pickton episode because of this trope. In the case of Pickton, not only did the Vancouver Police Department not investigate the disappearance of Pickton's sex worker victims and even ignore evidence of possibly up to four serial killers in the particular slum Pickton hunted in, they were plagued by petty infighting as they actively bullied and undermined the one cop who was trying to do something because his efforts and other successes made them look bad.
• In Meme House, the incompetence of the Oasis Spring police force is a sight to behold. They've been defeated by locked doors, fooled when suspects pretend to be asleep, dance and violate several gun safety laws, and on the rare occasion they do arrest someone it's impossible to keep them in prison for long.
• Puffin Forest: In "That time our characters when to New York City, the character characters killed several people with bows and arrows and somehow the police never caught them.
• One of the major factors in Carly Parker starting the RABBITS podcast to document her investigation into the disappearance of her childhood friend, Yumiko, is that the police assumed her disappearance was her deliberately running away to escape the academic pressures of a Japanese immigrant household. Putting aside that this stereotypical view is not an accurate description of Yumiko's parents, it also means they have never taken the investigation seriously enough for Carly. She notes multiple times that her insistence that there is more to it only seems to annoy them.
• Squid Game has the South Korean police forces completely oblivious to the life-or-death games happening.
  • The protagonist Gi-hun after being allowed to go free runs to the police asking them to investigate this matter. However, he only has a card with the phone number assigned to him to accept the invitation as proof, and the operators of the game made sure the number gets re-routed to some other random, unlucky caller. With no idea how to even find the perpetrators and doubtful Gi-hun isn't just another crazy drunk homeless man, the police force Gi-hun to leave their station.
  • Later on, we learn that the Front Man, who oversees the game, was an ex-cop himself and thus has superb understanding of how well the Korean police forces operate.
• Survival of the Fittest has the Denton police force, who are either too corrupt or too incompetent to deal with any of the gang violence rife in the city. This is to the point where the gangs practically run the place, shootouts and mass brawls being a common occurrence.
• The deputies in T.O.T., sans Eddie Sanchez (who's an inversion) and Giggs (who made a mistake and tried to fix it), are severely incompetent. They don't send backup to the Green Water subdivision, even after dozens of people call the sheriff's department telling them they need help. This is mainly because the corrupt Sheriff and undersheriff are either blocking the calls or informing the deputies that the calls are pranks (some of which actually were prank calls). Nevertheless, the fact that none of the deputies even rose an eyebrow when they received so many calls shows that many of the deputies were either being lazy or not thinking clearly at all.
  Dylan: You cops are fucking idiots.
• The Sheriff's Secret Police from Welcome to Night Vale. In "Glow Cloud", when a giant glowing cloud starts raining dead animals on Night Vale, they suggest that citizens "run directly at the cloud, shrieking and waving your arms, just to see what it does". In the same episode, they dismiss complaints about illegal vehicle searches by pointing out that "our backwards court system will uphold any old authoritarian rule made up on the fly by unsupervised gun-carrying thugs of a shadow government".
• In The With Voices Project, the Human Child actually thinks to call 911 with the cell phone Toriel gave him, in Undertale With Voices: Pacifist. Unfortunately, thanks to the magical barrier in place on Mt. Ebott, the cops can do nothing but wish him the best in his new life underground.
• In Worm, the Brockton Bay PRT barely bother fighting the truly malicious local supervillains or their gangs, and past a certain point the more friendly-ish supervillains are doing more to help their newly carved out territories and fight the major threats than they are. The mundane police are also useless the one time they appear, although that can be forgiven on account of their opponents being the Slaughterhouse Nine.

---