History PoliceAreUseless / LiveActionFilms

** Played straight with the Chicago Police Department. They suspect and arrest Richard Kimble for his wife's murder within hours and don't appear to do ''any'' investigating into his (truthful) account of what happened, whereas Kimble, once he escapes, is able to track down his wife's killer within weeks. Given that the one-armed man who actually murdered Kimble's wife was [[spoiler:an ex-CPD cop]], [[AlternativeCharacterInterpretation some viewers have theorized that]] [[DirtyCop the CPD framed Kimble to cover for him]].

* ''Film/AnacondasTheHuntForTheBloodOrchid'': When the expedition loses their boat to an InevitableWaterfall, Gail suggests using their satellite phone to call the police. Tran explains that the nearest river patrol is back in the village they left several days ago, and would have to somehow travel safely across the same waterfall.

* ''Film/{{Cyberjack}}'': In this [[DieHardOnAnX Die Hard knockoff]] [[RecycledInSpace set in the future]], the police are just as useless. The police [[AttackDrone drone]] and its handlers mistake the hero for one of the terrorists and spend much of the movie pursuing him while the bad guys work on completing their plan.

* In the WWII film ''Film/T34'', a German police officer in a town immediately surrenders to the Russian protagonists. It really helps that the latter group has the titular [[TankGoodness T-34-85 medium tank]] and the former only has a bolt-action rifle.

* ''Film/TwoDaysInTheValley:'' Zigzagged with each of the four cops in the movie.

* Played with in ''Film/{{Abominable}}''. Sheriff Halderman and the other cops are completely incompetent, but [[OnlySaneMan Deputy [=McBride=]]] is actually legitimate at his job, which results in him being the only one of the cops to survive when he goes off in search of real evidence while the others wind up [[spoiler:wandering into the territory of the creatures.]]

* Apart from [[TheAntagonist the main antagonist]], Sheriff Lyle Wallace, who may be a CorruptCop, but is very good at his job, most of the police officers in In ''Film/{{Convoy}}'' are either incompetent, [[DirtyCoward cowards]] and/or [[PoliceBrutality brutal bigots]].

* Showcased in the idiotic Music/JenniferLopez movie ''Film/{{Enough}}''. As one review put it, "I wonder how exactly the judge would word his ruling. 'While it is true that your husband [[DomesticAbuse has beaten you]] and that you have produced three separate and unrelated groups of reputable witnesses from around the country who say that he has committed at least a dozen serious felonies, including threatening to murder six different people, the mother of his child among them, I rule that custody goes to the father and furthermore proclaim that [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney he shall not be prosecuted for these crimes because he is rich]]. Even though J-Lo is now rich too, via her father. I just hate women. And children. [[EvilLaugh Bwoohahahahahaha']]"

* ''Film/Gone2012'': {{Zigzagged}}. The police mostly believe Jill is delusional due to her past mental issues and not discovering any evidence for her claims of being abducted. However, Detective Hood believes her and does try to help. Jill doesn't trust him though due to her negative experiences with them, and goes off on her own.

** Played straight in that Storch [[spoiler: is a DirtyCop who joins in on Jennifer's rape, torture and attempted murder. Naturally, when her publisher calls Earl over a month later to report Jennifer missing, she's ignored.]]

* NBC Movie Of The Week, ''A Cry For Help:The Tracey Thurman Story'', doesn't even begin to describe this trope. First off, the abusive husband already has a restraining order against him, but it doesn't stop him from marching on over to Tracy's house. Then Tracy calls the cops, who take their sweet ass time getting there. By the time they do, the husband has ''stabbed'' her multiple times. This also draws in a crowd, who now are witnesses to this crime. The cop also restrained a guy who was restraining the husband, who beats her up. Guess what the cop does? He stands there and looks as the husband beats her up and rants on how she should die. While they did call an ambulance and restrain the husband from clawing at her while she was on the stretcher, the fact that they could have done so much more and could have prevented some of the damage done onto Tracey got them ''sued'' for it, [[{{Deconstruction}} making]] [[DeconstructedTrope this...]] For reference, [[TruthInTelevision this is based on a true story]], and the resulting lawsuit [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome considerably improved the average police response to domestic disturbances]].

* ''Film/{{Scream}}'': This is zig-zagged. The Zagging comes in when you consider that despite their efforts usually accounting for nothing much, the police actually ''do'' actively try to help the protagonists, for example, imposing curfews, posting bodyguards to Sidney (and by proxy, those around her) and usually believing the protagonists almost immediately when it becomes apparent that they're being targeted.

* Mocked and played straight in ''Film/SuperTroopers.'' The Highway Patrolmen are useless because they are just goofing around. The local Police are useless because [[spoiler: [[DirtyCop they are actually in on the drug ring]].]]
* In the WWII film ''Film/{{T 34}}'', a German police officer in a town immediately surrenders to the Russian protagonists. It really helps that the latter group has the titular [[TankGoodness T-34-85 medium tank]] and the former only has a bolt-action rifle.

* PlayedForLaughs in ''Film/TheBigLebowski''. When asked about leads regarding the Dude's stolen car, the policeman replies ironically: "Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts!" This is actually TruthInTelevision as the car itself has almost no value and therefore they really wouldn't care all that much. Auto theft isn't generally a huge priority anyway.

* In ''Film/TheHost'', the police are unable to do anything about the giant monster attacking people in Seoul, practically let a little girl be dragged off by it and they and the doctors refuse to believe her father, Park Gang-du, when he tells them she's still alive (She is, and he was the only witness to her distress call). When a doctor finally seems to believe Gang-du, he asks him why he didn't tell the police, Gang-du cries, "Because nobody f***ing listens to me, damn it! "

* ''Film/REC'' plays with this. The two police officers are unsurprisingly no match for a zombie outbreak in an apartment block, although they clearly are trying their best in a horrendous situation (and the junior officer is abruptly promoted when [[spoiler:his senior partner dies]]). However, even once they have realised what the virus is and how it is spread, the younger cop continues to make a series of blunders with catastrophic results.

* ''Film/TheBlob1958'', starring Creator/SteveMcQueenActor, is perhaps the archetypal example. Which is odd because it actually plays against itself throughout with one cop willing to trust the teenagers and another (the former's subordinate) being extremely distrustful of them.

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** Played straight with the Chicago Police Department. They suspect and arrest Richard Kimble for his wife's murder within hours and don't appear to do ''any'' investigating into his (truthful) account of what happened, whereas Kimble, once he escapes, is able to track down his wife's killer within weeks. Given that the one-armed man who actually murdered Kimble's wife was [[spoiler:an ex-CPD officer]], [[AlternativeCharacterInterpretation it's led many viewers to theorize that]] [[DirtyCop the CPD framed Kimble to cover for him]].

** Played straight with the Chicago Police Department. They suspect and arrest Richard Kimble for his wife's murder within hours and don't appear to do ''any'' investigating into his (truthful) account of what happened, whereas Kimble, once he escapes, is able to track down his wife's killer within weeks. Given that the one-armed man who actually murdered Kimble's wife was [[spoiler:an ex-CPD officer]], [[AlternativeCharacterInterpreation it's led many viewers to theorize that]] [[DirtyCop the CPD framed Kimble to cover for him]].

** Played straight with the Chicago Police Department. They suspect and arrest Richard Kimble for his wife's murder within hours and don't appear to do ''any'' investigating into his (truthful) account of what happened, whereas Kimble, once he escapes, is able to track down his wife's killer within weeks.

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* The remake of ''Film/FunWithDickAndJane'' had one part where a Latino man impersonates Dick with a ''picture ID'' during an Immigration raid. ''And it works.'' And even worse, Dick -- a US citizen whose obvious American accent is temporarily obscured by an injury - is deported to Mexico with seemingly no due process, and despite his lack of any Mexican identification documents.

* The cops in ''Film/HomeAlone'' are poster children for this trope. When Kevin's mother calls them to report that her eight-year-old son has been stranded alone for at least a day, she spends several minutes being bounced around between two bored cops who can't be bothered to try to comprehend what she's telling them before finding someone else to foist her on. Eventually, they dispatch a third cop, who then waits all of 45 seconds after knocking on the door of Kevin's house before concluding that no one is home and leaving.

* ''Literature/NoCountryForOldMen'' has an ideal example of the police doing absolutely nothing useful whatsoever for the course of the film. They might has well have never been there, including the star sheriff played by ''Creator/TommyLeeJones''. The worst example has to be when they first visit Llewyn's trailer, which turns out to be empty, but someone has clearly been there due to the milk being left out and cold. The sheriff dismisses the idea of mentioning that the murderous psychopath Anton Chigurh is around, due to them knowing nothing about him--it doesn't occur to him that others in the park might have seen him, most notably, the person who directly interacted with him, the owner of the park, as well as any others who probably noticed him breaking into Llewyn's trailer. Later in the film, Sheriff Bell learns that [[spoiler:Llewyn is headed to El Paso, and promises Llewyn's wife only he will go to see him...which is at least six hours from where he is at the time. Sheriff Bell does not alert the El Paso police that there might be a massacre exactly there, nor does he seem too concerned about the fact that it's probably safe to say Anton will be there, too. The obvious happens when a simple phone call to the El Paso authorities saying a massive gun battle was about to break out there would have given them some cause for concern.]] Instead, he lets all of it happen without telling anyone about the inevitable shootout that's definitely going to occur before he gets there.

* In ''Film/RunLolaRun'', Lola's second run has her robbing her father's bank. The money is put into a trash bag and she throws the gun she was using aside before leaving through the front door... right into a row of police cars and policemen, with their guns pointed right where she is. Thinking she's been caught, Lola is shellshocked, only for a policeman to tackle her aside, having mistaken her for an innocent by-stander or simply the cleaning lady, due to the trashbag in her hand. [[SarcasmMode Cause there's no way the money could be held in a trash bag]].

** In ''Film/{{Scream|1996}}'', during the finale, the only cop present - Dewey - is taken out very quickly, and it's [[BadassNormal Sidney and Gail]] that put an end to everything.

* In ''Film/Utoya22Juli'', a reenactment of the 2011 Norway Attacks (which happened [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin on the island Utøya on 22. July 2011]]) from the perspective of the victims, the problem is not what the police do, but rather that no police appeared on the island for more than 70 minutes. Sadly this was TruthInTelevision - the ending credits point out that the police failed the victims by appearing way too late due to a long list of mishaps. Reportedly the terrorist himself was surprised it took so long. Trying to underscore this is also the reason so many deaths happen in the later stages of the movie [[spoiler: including Kaja herself]].

---> '''Detective Wilson:''' What I'm saying is - if you want to see this man put away for a long time - a charge of murder goes a lot further.

* ''Film/{{Zodiac}}'' deconstructs this trope pretty well. It's not that the SFPD are incompetent, per se - [[HollywoodHistory by the movie's account anyway]], Detective Toschi fingers the correct suspect early on and arrests him at one point. However, a number of contributing factors hamper his investigation: [[ObstructiveBureaucrat overlapping jurisdictions]] among different departments, the lack of hard evidence, adverse media coverage, a panicky public, and just plain bad luck.

* ''Film/IRobot'' zig-zags the trope quite a bit from the audience perspective, but are an aversion in-universe. To the audience, blessed with the evidence that there is in fact a robot conspiracy, nobody believes Detective Spooner and the police officers seem to be extremely incompetent as a result. But the police officers (realistically) believe it's more likely for one of their police officers ([[spoiler:who was once badly mangled in a car crash where two other people lost their lives]]) to be unhinged, than for every robot in existence to be dangerous. When one of the police officers in the car tunnel makes a sotto voce wisecrack about thinking Spooner is losing it, Spooner flies off the handle in a tirade that all but confirms it. However, once the shoe drops and the robots attack, the police respond without hesitation -- but are caught by surprise, and so are so woefully outmatched by the robots that they offer little effective resistance.

* ''Film/IRobot'' zig-zags the trope quite a bit from the audience perspective, but are an aversion in-universe. To the audience, blessed with the evidence that there is in fact a robot conspiracy, nobody believes Detective Spooner and the police officers seem to be extremely incompetent. But the police officers (realistically) believe it's more likely for one of their police officers ([[spoiler:who was once badly mangled in a car crash where two other people lost their lives]]) to be unhinged, than for every robot in existence to be dangerous; when one of the police officers in the car tunnel makes a sotto voce wisecrack about thinking Spooner is losing it, Spooner flies off the handle in a tirade. However, once the shoe drops and the robots attack, the police respond without hesitation -- but are caught by surprise, and so are so woefully outmatched by the robots that they offer little effective resistance.

* ''{{Film/Gone}}'': {{Zigzagged}}. The police mostly believe Jill is delusional due to her past mental issues and not discovering any evidence for her claims of being abducted. However, Detective Hood believes her and does try to help. Jill doesn't trust him though due to her negative experiences with them, and goes off on her own.

* Deconstructed in ''Film/TheDarkKnightRises''; Batman justifies coming out of retirement to fight Bane by claiming the police can't handle it, only for Alfred to point out that the cops ''could'' handle it if Bruce gave them all those fancy gadgets and techniques he invented as Batman. It's also shown that the GCPD's slow response is partly because Gotham's crime rates plummeted after the events of [[Film/TheDarkKnight the last film]], thanks to a combination of Joker and Two-Face destroying much of the mob's leadership and the Dent Act helping the cops crack down on organized crime. The police had simply grown complacent (much like [[NotSoDifferent Batman himself did]]) and understandably hadn't been expecting a military level supervillain plot to take over the city.