Police Are Useless / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

#-E

• The Keystone Kops were one of the earliest examples. Indeed, this was their schtick.
• 2 Days in the Valley: Zig-zagged with each of the four cops in the movie.
  • Wes neglects his duty during a prostitution sting and lies that the girl is innocent due to feeling sorry for her (although not without reason). He also disturbs a crime scene even after being told not to. However, he picks up on Becky Saying Too Much about the murder and correctly deduces a possible motive. During a shootout, he also orders Dosmo (who he believes to be an innocent bystander) not to endanger himself by leaving cover to help Wes, even when Webb threatens to kill Wes.
  • Alvin is obsessed with busting a massage parlor for prostitution even after being told they aren't doing anything, and dismisses a clue that Wes picks up on. He also pulls a gun on a golfer who breaks his window. However, he's right about the massage parlor engaging in prostitution. He also rarely inspects a murder scene and warns Wes not to disturb anything before a forensic examination.
  • Detectives Creighton and Valenzuela believe Becky's lies, and Creighton unprofessionally hits on her. They also are easily surprised by a hitman returning to the crime scene. However, they quickly pick up on how the cigarette pack was obviously planted there to mislead them, given how professional the rest of the hit is.
• The 6th Day, like The Simpsons, combines this with For Inconvenience, Press "1". The system's voice-activated, and the answer to each question is an increasingly annoyed "Yes." The last straw is when answering that there's a direct and current threat to someone's safety still doesn't connect the hero to a human being.
• Played with in Abominable. Sheriff Halderman and the other cops are completely incompetent, but 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 wandering into the territory of the creatures.
• Act of Vengeance: The women form the Rape Squad to extract vengeance because the police show almost no interest in catching their rapist; often saying they don't even believe a crime has been committed. Even the more sympathetic Sgt. Long admits it will be almost impossible to secure a conviction assuming they do catch him, as their rapist always wore a mask.
• In Air Force One, the President's Secret Service detail and the armed soldier holding the nuclear football are all killed without so much as wounding a single terrorist. It's slightly justified in that the terrorists are all wearing body armor and armed with heavier weapons while the Secret Service has nothing but pistols. Also justified in that the guy heading the Secret Service is in league with the terrorists.
• Ajnabee: The Swiss police are portrayed as quite incompetent, being easily being fooled by Big Bad's Vicky scheme to frame Raj and arrest him on little proof. When Raj feels his trial won't prove his innocence, he flees the building in order to clear his name on his own.
• Played straight in most Alfred Hitchcock films, due to his own fear of the police from a traumatic childhood experience. However, it's subverted in Dial M for Murder, with a cop who works against the innocent framed protagonist but eventually figures out what's really going on and sets up a trap for the villain and Frenzy, where the cop suspects the protagonist's innocence right from the start.
• American Nightmare (1983): The city's police force, particularly Sgt. Skylar, are too apathetic to do anything about the murders and are utterly dismissive of the missing women. A major theme of the film is how law enforcement agencies are often indifferent towards individuals such as prostitutes, junkies, and vagrants.
• Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid: When the expedition loses their boat to an Inevitable Waterfall, 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 to reach them.
• Angels & Demons has a really bad case of this. Although this was supposed to be a more or less rational thriller, a single assassin manages to kill the Italian and Papal police presence at a top-priority crime scene in city centre of Rome, using little more than a Silencer Pistol. The Da Vinci Code (the predecessing film), actually shows the police to be partially competent rather than completely incompetent. The French police, for instance, may not have managed to catch Langdon and his cronies, but still managed not only not to leave them unguarded in the Louvre, but also to seal off the American embassy and all the public Transit of Paris, and managed to track them down very fast over and over, by investigating in the right spots, and asking the right people.
• In The Art of Self-Defense, the Police are helpless to stop the small motorcycle gang that is beating and robbing lone pedestrians. Their one attempt at a sting fails spectacularly when the cop is so scared he misses an easy gunshot and gets beaten to death by a single assailant.
• In Ask a Policeman, Turnbottom Round prides itself as the village without crime; there has not been an arrest recorded by the local police for 10 years. Unfortunately, this is more to do with Sgt. Dudfoot and his constables Albert Brown and Jerry Harbottle being too incompetent, lazy, cowardly and corrupt to so much as recognise a crime, let alone stop one. Even when they attempt to fabricate a crime for their own benefit, it goes hilariously wrong.
• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Pietro aka Quicksilver runs into a police station, tells everybody that a big battle is about to go down and they need to help evacuate the city, then runs out. As soon as he leaves, the officers shrug and go back to what they were doing. Pietro has to return and fire a gun into the ceiling to get them to pay attention. Later, the police's guns are ineffective against Ultron's robots (even though Black Widow's guns work just fine) and one of them accidentally shoots Pietro in the arm. The officers do help evacuate the city.
• Marshal Strickland in Back to the Future Part III doesn't seem to care that Buford Tannen attempted to murder Doc Brown, in front of dozens of witnesses, at the town fayre.
• The sheriff in Bad Day at Black Rock is a useless drunkard; mostly as a result of his guilt regarding the dark secret of his Town with a Dark Secret.
• Bad Samaritan: Subverted. Though the local police and FBI don't provide much help to Sean at first, it isn't really because they're corrupt, incompetent or just apathetic. Rather, Cale just covers things up very well, and they only have his word for it. Later, they're hamstrung by needing to wait for a search warrant at Cale's land in the country before hearing gunshots, which lets them enter. However, by the time Sean and Katie are found by the FBI they've already overpowered Cale by themselves.
• Barbarian:
  • When Tess is seemingly chased into her rental home and calls 911, she's repeatedly told that there are no units available to help her, and the operator is dismissive of her situation.
  • Later, Tess calls the cops after escaping abduction. The two cops who arrive see her as a disheveled black woman in a Detroit slum and clearly dismiss her as a paranoid junkie. They devote almost no time to investigating her claim before getting called away to the scene of an active shooter.
  • The trope is thematically referenced when AJ sings along to Donovan's "Riki Tiki Tavi," which talks about how you have to "kill the snakes" without the help of official institutions.
• Played for Laughs in The Big Lebowski. When asked about leads regarding the Dude's stolen car, the policeman replies sarcastically: "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 Truth in Television, as the LAPD won't devote any manpower to actively track down stolen property.
• Black Cougar: The police are completely baffled as to what is causing children to disappear around the neighbourhood.
• Black Lightning (2009):
  • It's a miracle Dima can fly across Moscow without getting immediate attention from the authorities and nobody finding him despite the car still being a rare model with unique painting and license plate.
  • Kuptsov's drilling gets no investigation, despite the source of earthquakes generally being something easy to find.
  • Helicopters are apparently reserved only for reporters. When someone needs saving from high altitudes, rescue services or police helicopters are nowhere in sight.
• The Blob (1958), starring Steve McQueen, 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.
• This trope is why Blood Debts has a plot. After Mark Collins' daughter is raped and murdered, he realizes that the police won't bring her killers to justice, so he does so himself, while also killing several unrelated criminals. The police don't figure out who is responsible, but Bill does, blackmailing Mark with evidence of his crimes to get him to do more killings, ostensibly targeting people the law can't touch. Some of the police are willing to let Mark continue killing and do his job for him, while others are willing to arrest him with the evidence they received after Bill decided Mark was no longer useful. In the end, Mark kills Bill, then voluntarily turns himself in, meaning the police contributed nothing.
• Jill from Blood Harvest makes a few attempts at calling the sheriff on her stalker, but by the time he arrives, whatever she was worried about is gone. He's very dismissive even at first, and quickly becomes convinced that Jill is either playing tricks or imagining things.
• Subverted in Blue Velvet, where Jeffrey actually does consult a police detective and knows that he should just leave things to the police but keeps investigating on his own anyway. Admittedly, Dorothy Vallens repeatedly tells Jeffrey "no police" when he tries to help her, but it turns out she has good reason to be afraid- Det. Williams' partner is in league with Frank Booth.
• The Chicago Police and Illinois State Police in The Blues Brothers.
• The Book of Revelation: Daniel tries to report the crimes he suffered, but the police start laughing after being told the perpetrators were women. After this, it appears that he understandly decides they won't help and tries to find his attackers on his own. It may be averted by the end though, when Daniel is seen starting to tell Oslen, a police detective, what happened (he's sympathetic and specializes in such cases).
• In The Brave One, the NYPD are not shown in the most glamorous light. After the attack that puts protagonist Erica Bain into a brief coma, when two detectives try to interview her they have a very 'going through the motions' attitude about it, with one even getting annoyed at her. After a while of trying to catch them on the phone to get an update on her case, she shows up at the station hoping to talk to them in person, only to be told that they're out. The desk sergeant can't even find her file in the first place so she's forced to wait for someone else to come along to update her, which never happens. This is what leads her to buying a gun so that she can feel safe to walk the streets again, which leads to her becoming a vigilante. Even when Erica tries to confess to police after she gets involved in three separate shootings, the officer she tries to tell is only half listening, and a frustrated Erica leaves.
• In Bunni, a policeman happens across the shop the cast are in and decides to investigate. After radioing it into the station (with a mouth full of the cupcake he was eating), he goes into the building, and is soon murdered by the killer.
• The "party cop" from Cabin Fever. Instead of doing his job and helping the protagonists, he's only interested in partying. And talking about partying.
• Changeling. First, the police (who, in that city-Los Angeles-,were extremely corrupt at that time) refuse to investigate Walter's disappearance until the morning after Walter's mother, Christine, reports it. Then, after months of "searching", they give her a boy who isn't her son. They refuse to believe her when she points this out, despite many obvious discrepancies between his physical characteristics and Walter's (such as the boy being three inches shorter than Walter). It just keeps getting worse from there, with the police actively obstructing any and all attempts to locate the real Walter, simply to avoid losing face. An officer who has discovered a murdered boy is even ordered not to investigate because it could mean finding the real Walter's body and admitting that they never found or even tried to find Walter to begin with. They even go so far as to have Christine involuntarily committed to a mental institution to destroy her credibility. The staff there turn out to be no less corrupt than the police. The worst part is that Changeling is based on a true story.
• The police are depicted as being extremely incompetent in The Chaser, to the point where they're more concerned with damage control over someone throwing shit at the mayor than they are with a missing woman and a man who confesses to be a serial killer and claims that he's holding her captive.
• Clown Face: Taken to new levels in this film. When Nigel calls the police about the killer clown loose in the office building, they ask to clarify that he said "killer clown". He says yes, they hang up.
• Clownhouse: As the boys return home from the circus, the mental patients dressed as clowns target their home. Casey and his brothers are locked inside their isolated farmhouse and the power is turned off. Casey attempts to call the police, but the police officer assumes that Casey's fear of clowns caused him to have a realistic nightmare and hangs up.
• Lampshaded in Color of Night by Capa when Detective Martinez shows up just after he was almost bitten by a rattlesnake planted in his mailbox.
  Just like a cop! Never there when you need them!
• In Commando, the police who arrest Matrix at the army surplus store don't even bother to put Matrix in cuffs, and they also fail to notice that Cindy is helping him. They also dismiss Matrix's requests of trying to get in touch with General Kirby as crazy talk, not to mention that when they finally do notice Cindy, they mistake her as a prostitute.
• Apart from the main antagonist, Sheriff Lyle Wallace, who may be a Dirty Cop but is very good at his job, most of the police officers in Convoy are either incompetent, cowards and/or brutal bigots.
• NBC's 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, making this... For reference, this is based on a true story, and the resulting lawsuit considerably improved the average police response to domestic disturbances.
• Cyberjack: In this Die Hard knockoff set in the future, the police are just as useless. The police 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.
• Deconstructed in The Dark Knight Rises; 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 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 Batman himself did) and understandably hadn't been expecting a military level supervillain plot to take over the city.
• In Dark Skies the cop is an idiot who blames all the strange phenomena caused by the aliens on kids, sleepwalking, and sleepwalking kids.
• Dark Waters: The EPA (a relatively young agency at the time the beginning of the film) is portrayed as overwhelmed and behind the curve in classifying chemicals, getting their supposedly complete list of which chemicals are dangerous and should be regulated from the companies themselves.
• Dawning of the Dead: In one scene early in the movie, some police officers are seen setting up a barrier and are preparing to start shooting the zombies. They're overwhelmed as soon as they start shooting.
• A somewhat more well-thought out example happens in Demolition Man. The San Angeles Police Department has been reduced to a peace-keeping force for a city full of petty crimes following the more peaceful evolution of society. As such, when Simon Phoenix, a real criminal awakened from cryogenic stasis, starts making trouble, the police are utterly incapable of stopping him. Only Spartan, a cop from the same era, is up to the challenge.
• While reporting a ghost is pretty ridiculous, it's hard not to shake your head when the police officers in Dead Friend laugh in Ji-won's face and call her crazy when there are a bunch of random, unexplainable and downright impossible deaths happening around the city.
• The Dead Center: The results are mixed. As a medical examiner, Dr. Graham does a great job at tracking down information on his missing John Doe, though he only finds his exact location due to the demon taking over and giving the hospital staff Michael's information, and even then he got there too late to stop Michael's dad from taking him home. He gets killed pretty quickly in the final confrontation as well. Also, the psych ward security is very effective at subduing Dr. Forrester, but do a pretty mediocre job at guarding and securing him. Also, the local police arrive just in time to unintentionally distract the demon, and competently handle securing the neighborhood and collecting bodies after the demon's rampage.
• Death Wish 3:
  • It appears that the NYPD does not do that much to quell gang related violence in the city. They even confiscate guns belonging to the residents of the area terrorized by Fraker's gang. Only in the end we see them fight the bad guys, but with casualties that makes the townspeople and Kersey more effective in fighting the bad guys than them. It's lampshaded by Rodriguez:
  Kersey: How about the cops? Do they do anything?
  Rodriguez: Yes, they enforce the parking laws.
  • Furthermore, very early on it is mentioned that the police are on the lookout to confiscate any and all firearms within the neighborhood, regardless of whether they are licensed or not or that taking them away inevitably leaves the residents defenseless against the psychotic (and now solely armed) gangs.
• Destroyer (1988): One policeman, Officer Callahan, comes to the prison. What happens to him? He gets killed by Ivan with a jackhammer.
• Pick a Die Hard movie. Any of them.
  • Al is the exception. And John McClane IS a cop. Otherwise...
  • Probably the worst instance is in the first film, where John's quite rational radio call about the hostage situation is dismissed as a prank for no reason at all, despite gunfire being clearly heard in the background of the call.
  Dispatcher: Attention whoever you are, this channel is reserved for emergency calls only.
  John McClane: No fucking shit, lady! Do I sound like I'm ordering a pizza?!
  • In real life, the channel McClane is using, Channel 9 (CB distress channel), is monitored by Radio Emergency Associated Communications Teams (REACT), not the police department. If someone were calling for help on Channel 9, they would talk to a REACT operator, who would then call the authorities. Either way, it would not be an FCC violation.
  • When the cops and later FBI finally do show up, they don't manage to do anything but die, open the last vault lock for the bad guys, shoot at McClane and miss, then die some more.
  • In Die Hard 2, terrorists infiltrate the airport baggage plant. They were wearing plain clothes, with no security passes. The doors weren't locked. John McClane and the terrorists engage in a shootout, which doesn't seem to alert security.
  • In Live Free or Die Hard, this is subverted due to the police being rendered incapacitated by Gabriel's cyberterrorist attack (blocking cell phone signals and causing gridlock on highways).
• This is a major theme in Dirty Harry, in which the San Francisco Police are seen as being extremely bureaucratic to a point where it interferes with justice and causes murderers like Scorpio to get away with their actions. Even the title character has to break the rules in order to get anything done, to the point where at the end he throws away his badge as a symbol of his disgust with the system.
• District 13: In the first 20 minutes of the first film, Leito kidnaps the druglord Taha from his fortified gang compound, and delivers him and several kilos of cocaine to the last remaining police station in District 13. The police chief, who is already on his way out as the station is being shut down for good, sees the station being surrounded by dozens of armed men working for Taha. Realizing that they're outgunned, he lets Taha walk out with his drugs AND Leito's sister Lola, and imprisons Leito for his own "protection". Averted by Deuteragonist Damien, who is an ass-kicking By-the-Book Cop extraordinaire.
• Doctor at Sea: The policemen in Bellos do nothing about the frequent stealing as they're all too busy off gambling.
• In Dredd, the judges are barely able to control the massive city because, as Dredd very matter-of-factly puts it, there are 12 serious crimes reported every minute, 17,000 per day, and they have the ability to respond to around 6% of them. That a number of them are corrupt and even willing to kill other judges if a criminal ponies up the dough doesn't help matters either...
• Showcased in the idiotic Jennifer Lopez movie Enough. As one review put it, "I wonder how exactly the judge would word his ruling. 'While it is true that your husband 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 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. Bwoohahahahahaha'"

F-L

• In Fair Game (1986), the local sheriff is unwilling to go after the poachers, and suggests that Cassandra Delaney's character drops the charges against them.
• Downplayed in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The NYPD may not be incompetent, but they're no match for a force of pure dark magic.
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off: The police don't believe Ferris' sister when she calls them about Principal Rooney breaking into her house. They even bring her to the station for making a phony call to the police.
• All the police in Four Brothers are inept, corrupt, or both. At first Lt. Green appears to be the exception, but he turns out to be Too Dumb to Live.
• Four Lions just might represent the high point of cinematic police ineptitude. Not only do they fail to stop a suicide attack (and arrest the wrong guy when they get wind of it), they arguably cause more mayhem than the terrorists they were trying to stop.
• Fragment of Fear: After Aunt Lucy is murdered, the police barely investigate at all, and when Tim tells them he's being stalked, they assume he's started taking hallucinogenic drugs again.
• The sheriff in Frailty automatically assumes that Fenton is lying when he comes and tells him in a total panic that his father has murdered at least two people and immediately has a sit-down with his father as the first course of action. Then again, the movie's such a Mind Screw it's hard to tell how much if any of the story told is true or not.
• in Frankenstein 1970, Inspector Rabb and his men are completely useless. Rabb initially dismisses reports of three people vanishing from the castle as nothing to be concerned about, and then misses vital evidence when he searches the crypt: evidence Row is able to discover in a few minutes when he searches the crypt later. It is left to Row to discover proof that the three people did not leave town at all, which finally forces Rabb to act.
• Friday the 13th:
  • In Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Tommy Jarvis desperately attempts to warn the police of Crystal Lake/Forest Green after he accidentally brings Serial Killer Jason Voorhees back to life, but nobody but the sheriff's own daughter will believe him. Jason's subsequent bloodbath only convinces the cops that Tommy himself is the killer, acting out a delusion of Jason's return. Never mind that the sheriff's daughter can vouch for Tommy because he was with her during two of the murders. The cops are only forced to accept Tommy's story only when they are attacked by Jason himself at the camp, and promptly killed.
  • Subverted at the beginning of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. The FBI spring a trap on Jason and actually take him seriously, attacking him with a small army's worth of firepower and an airstrike, managing to actually blow him to bits. It doesn't keep him down, but it was a very impressive effort.
• From Hand to Mouth: Harold Lloyd can't get any of the local beat cops to care when trying to tell them that an innocent woman has been kidnapped by thugs. So he assaults a bunch of them, and leads them on a madcap chase to the kidnappers' lair.
• The Fugitive: 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 a former CPD cop, some theorize that the CPD framed Kimble to cover for him.
• The Funhouse Massacre: When Deputy Doyle gets a Prank Call from someone claiming to be at the Land Of Illusions Haunted House Attraction, and ignores all further calls from there on the grounds that it's just more pranks.
• The remake of Fun with Dick and Jane 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.
• Ghost in the Machine: If the police even show up, they make no contribution whatsoever. Aside from not bothering to inform Terri that the killer stole her address book before his death and that she was his last intended victim, the killer also manipulates the cops into converging on the home of Terri's mother after she sends Josh there for safety by calling in a downed officer in hostage crisis. Despite no obvious signs of a hostage situation, they quickly turn it into a shooting gallery.
• The Sheriff in The Giant Gila Monster isn't very effective, often subcontracting his work out to a group of teenagers. Justified somewhat by the fact that the Sheriff is apparently the only cop in a county that contains 10,000 square miles of wilderness, and one man can't do much to track down missing people outside the actual communities.
• Zig-zagged Gone (2012). 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.
• A Good Woman Is Hard To Find: The police do nothing to solve Sarah's husband's murder. When she gets coerced into helping a thief, Sarah never calls them, possibly jaded by this. After she kills him in self-defense, they only come over afterward, with one being very unsympathetic to her apparent situation. They never feature in the plot again, as she goes about solving things herself.
• In The Goonies, Chunk calls the police to report a dead body and gang of thieves they discovered. The police instantly dismiss his claims, though granted Chunk was a constant liar and already had a reputation for calling the police over false and fantastical claims.
• In Gremlins, Billy's efforts to warn the police about the title creatures get blown off. But hey, would YOU have believed him? It gets even worse when those same cops see a man being mauled by the creatures and they don't bother to help him.
  • A MAD spoof of the film makes fun of this. A cop tells Billy, "The police never listen to the hero until it's too late!" Then he mentions films like The Blob.
  • Billy suffers similar disbelief and a helping of mockery from the security team in the sequel. They wise up when one gremlin tears through their surveillance system and assaults them.
  • It's even lampshaded in the DVD commentary for the second movie.
• In the Lifetime movie Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, George the security guard fits this trope. In actuality, he's the film's Big Bad; he purposefully invoked this trope in order to make it hard to believe that he could be the mastermind behind Jojo's kidnapping.
• Gun Fury: After the Slayton gang robs the stagecoach, kills the passengers and kidnaps his fiancée, Ben Warren rides to the nearest town to inform The Sheriff and raise a Posse. However, the sheriff refuses to help because the crime didn't happen in his county (and because of his fear of the Slayton gang).
• Halloween:
  • In Halloween (1978 original), the cynical Sheriff Leigh Brackett grudgingly looks for Michael Myers on the "off chance" that Michael is really in town and tells Loomis that if he is right about this, then "damn you (Loomis) for letting him go". In its first sequel, Halloween II (1981), Brackett finds one of Michael's victims in the original film was his only child, Annie, and repeats his promised "Damn you" blame at Loomis, despite Loomis being helpless against a state bureaucracy that didn't believe him about Michael's dangerousness when he was a newly committed small child and left him in minimum security instead of Loomis' recommended maximum security hospital, making Michael's 1978 escape and murder spree possible and more likely. In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Michael gets shot many times and knocked down a mineshaft towards the ending by the state police, who were contacted earlier. The opening of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) also shows them dropping dynamite in the shaft, just to be sure. Both Halloween's 4 and 5 have Haddonfield's entire police force massacred either by Michael himself or Michael's helper, the Man in Black, on their respective 1988 and 1989 Halloween nights.
  • In Rob Zombie's Halloween II (2009), Sheriff Brackett asks Andy, one of his deputies, to protect Annie. To say he fails horribly shouldn't come as a shock.
• The cops in The Hangover, both movies are pretty useless. In the second movie, the cop at the desk is merely extremely apathetic to the guy's problem of Teddy being missing, simply giving them a monk who has Teddy's clothes and ID and dismissing it as not being his problem from there. The cops in the first movie, however, are pretty extreme in ways that screw everybody. First, they arrest the guys for stuff they did last night, fair enough, they did break some laws. Then they more or less refuse to help them with Doug being missing. Then they show uselessness in a way that helps the protagonists, but simultaneously screws them over, as they allow them to escape their arrest with no charges in exchange for being tased, something all officers involved are clearly getting a huge thrill out of doing.
• Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay: Kumar sneaks drugs and paraphernalia onto an INTERNATIONAL fight to Amsterdam. Kumar was able to bypass security by causing a huge scene where he accused a black TSA worker of racial profiling over Kumar's ethnicity. In reality this wouldn't work, as bags are placed on an x-ray conveyer belt and questionable material are flagged and hand screened. Electronic devices are thoroughly checked, even lighters are confiscated. Since Kumar carried a suspicious-looking tube like object, the TSA could take him aside and further examine his baggage. This policy extends to ALL travelers through modern airlines. Yet Kumar's threats to call in the American Civil Liberties Union managed to cow and frighten "Matthew Perry" the security screener. Also when passengers get agitated, all they have to do is simply hit security (and sadly this can go very wrong, as with the case of the RCMP officer tasering an agitated Polish passenger to death who was throwing chairs violently after being detained by flight delay).
• Hayride: The police team in this movie, in their investigations of the murders that happened, don't believe for a moment that Ol' Pitchfork is real. They then try to keep Steven and Corey in the hospital, fail to find Ol' Pitchfork's secret cellar beneath his house, and being killed by Ol' Pitchfork. Even SWAT officers are no match for the guy.
• Help!: Subverted. While the Royal Guards at first seem to be a literal bunch of Redshirts (who get knocked out by gas, trapped in weightlessness, etc), and seemingly play this trope straight (as also seen by the fact that they never turn up for such things as restaurants and private homes getting invaded), it all suddenly changes once the Beatles actually decide to go to the police. Indeed, in the third act the police actually ends up saving the Beatles. Twice (British and Bahaman police respectively)!
• Subverted in Hocus Pocus. The apparent cop who bullies the children begging for help (insulting Max's manhood) is only a man in costume on Halloween. It plays Adults Are Useless straight, though.
• Home Alone:
  • The cops in Home Alone are poster children for this trope. When Kevin's mother calls them to report that her 8-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.
  • Home Alone 3: The cops show up the first two times Alex calls about a burglar. However, since the bad guys are internationally-wanted criminals working for North Korea, not run-of-the-mill crooks, they are able to evade detection and capture (although the cops appear to lack peripheral vision). He doesn't call them a third time, thinking they wouldn't show up. He does, however, call an Air Force recruiting office about a strange computer chip he finds in his toy car. While the sergeant dismisses his claims, he does agree to pass the serial number up the chain, eventually reaches the office of the Federal agent looking for it, who immediately heads to Chicago.
  • Home Sweet Home Alone: When Max's parents call the police to request someone to check on their son who is home alone, the dispatch is taken by a grown up Buzz McCallister, who instantly dismisses it believing that it's his brother Kevin doing his annual prank call (about a kid being home alone) and tells dispatch to forget about it.
• In The Host (2006), 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! "
• Hot Fuzz: Although Nicholas Angel himself is an obvious subversion, the central device allowing the plan of the bad guys in the movie to work is based around the idea that the Sanford Police Force are a bunch of incompetents who've been lulled into such a false sense of security and complacency by the tranquility of the village that they will respond to even blatantly obvious acts of homicide with the assumption that it's an accident of some kind. And they do, to the extent that their complete inability to recognize the blindingly obvious at one point leads Nicholas to doubt his own sanity. Ultimately subverted, however; once their eyes are truly opened to what's really going on in their village, they transform almost immediately into an efficient, competent unit more than capable of kicking ass and taking names.
• An extremely sad example of Truth in Television is depicted in Hotel Rwanda. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the United Nations soldiers stationed in Rwanda were not allowed to shoot the militiamen who were slaughtering Tutsis all across the country. Most of the native Hutu police took part in the genocide themselves. Within less than two months, over one million civilians were killed.
  Jack: I'm only allowed to leave four soldiers stationed here, Paul. And they're not allowed to shoot.
• To a completely idiotic degree in Identity Thief where the cops don't do anything at all to stop an identity thief from Miami despite knowing where that criminal will be, they don't even make a phone call to MPD or the Feds at all by handwaving it with Hollywood Law. They even let the Jason Bateman character kidnap the criminal, essentially having him do their jobs.
• In the Heat of the Night: Justified. There hasn't been a murder in Sparta in years, and the police don't have the forensic abilities to track one. That is where Mr. Tibbs comes in, and once Gillespie learns to let go of his prejudices, the police start doing better.
• The cops in Intruder on two instances. First is when they come to check a disturbance caused by one the workers' ex-boyfriend and then quickly leave without putting any effort on finding him and second is in the end where they arrest the wrong people for the killings.
• I, Robot 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 to be unhinged, than for every robot in existence to be dangerous. Spooner was once badly mangled by a runaway truck where his car and another car ended up in the river and several other people lost their lives. He was rescued by a robot, even when he insisted that a little girl caught in the wreckage should be saved instead; objectively, the robot made the right choice, but Spooner clearly had demons. 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 are so woefully outmatched by the robots that they offer little effective resistance.
• I Spit on Your Grave:
  • Played straight in that Storch is a Dirty Cop 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.
  • Zig-zagged in the second film. After Katie escapes the first time, a uniformed police officer approaches her relatively quickly and Kirill interviews her. It's somewhat played straight in that Kirill doesn't quite believe Katie's story and turns her over to a friend from church who he thought was a counselor but was actually the mother of Katie's rapists without any verification. Fortunately, he realizes his mistake later on, calls the US Embassy and saves Katie's life in the end.
  • In the remake and its sequels, it's possible the entire revenge plot could have been avoided just by going to the authorities. However, the avengers are clearly uninterested.
    • In the remake, Jennifer survives, then steals the tape of her rape. Assuming she'd turned this over to the police (maybe state troopers, bypassing Sheriff Storch), it's probable they would all have been arrested and later also convicted of their crimes.
    • Katie escaped, so she could tell the police who did it and where they were. However, in her case she might have feared police were in on it, as after going to them the first time Ana came and turned her over to the rapists once again.
    • Jennifer knew Marla intended to go retrieve some stuff from her abusive ex-boyfriend. Once she learns Marla was killed, telling the police about this might have helped to prove her boyfriend did it. She never even once mentions it though. Also, the whole rape support group knew Cassie is still being raped, yet not one says she could go to the police, or a woman's shelter at least. If she did go to the police, it's quite possible Ron would have been convicted, as even if they couldn't prove intent she's underage so any sexual contact would be statutory rape in any case.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Winnie initially reports witnessing a murder to the police in the alternate timeline. When they show up though she's shocked to see that Buck Waters is now the town sheriff, knowing his brother is the killer. His brother soon shows up too, and Winnie backtracks quickly, knowing that he won't help as a result. For the rest of the film she never attempts to report anything again.
• In It's a Wonderful World, they lose Guy on the train while he’s handcuffed to one of the policemen. They eventually catch up to him, but don't recognize him even though his fake accent is none too convincing.
• Many James Bond films, particularly (for some reason) the ones with sequences in America, see Bond having to avoid getting arrested by the police as well as staying on the villain's trail. Luckily, they're all hopeless drivers.
• The John Wick series: The police don't intervene at all past the first few moments in the first two films, with the same cop coming to the home, finding the sheer amounts of carnage Wick was involved with, and, knowing Wick, deciding to leave it at that. Somewhat justified, in that the cops probably know they don't stand anything resembling a chance against the guy, and he Would Not Shoot a Civilian so there's not much to gain.
• Kild TV: The local authorities, along with everyone else outside the studio, are utterly convinced that the TV crew's attempts to call for help through their broadcast are an elaborate publicity stunt, no matter how desperate they get. The one officer who seems suspicious of it has his conversation with the dispatcher interrupted by the chief, who explicitly tells him not to investigate, and says he doesn't want some kind of "War of the Worlds" incident on his hands. And when that cop actually goes to investigate the situation, he ends up killed by having the lower half of his body crushed between two vans.
• Kruel: Every time someone comes to the police about someone goes to the police with something about Elliot, or Willie, they always come up with a reason for why it isn't a good enough reason to act.
• Late Phases: Apparently once a month a person is brutally and viciously slashed to death in the retirement community of Crescent Bay. All they do is saying to stay far away from the forest and to close accurately the entrance door. The fact that the first person we see killed was killed after the werewolf broke in bursting through the closed entrance door and that the beast a first time almost breaks in Ambrose's house through a damn wall removes any doubt about the utility of these advices.
• Lights Out (2016): The officers who show up ignore Rebecca's warnings about Diana's weakness to light and die in mere seconds.
• Played for Laughs in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. While running wild through the streets of San Diego, a Tyrannosaurus rex is confronted by a fleet of police cruisers. The dinosaur roars a challenge, and all the police cars promptly turn around and take off, leaving the city and its civilians to fend for themselves. Later, the Army shows up after the T. rex has just been contained in the ship by Ian and Sarah, who probably would have the firepower to deal with a rampaging 5-ton predator.
• In Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Sgt. Mooney doesn't just ignore the protagonists — he gets dozens of calls from citizens under attack, and declares all of them to be pranks... and ends up an Asshole Victim for it. On the other hand, his direct superior does believe the kids, when given enough evidence, and ends up displacing the protagonist as the film's real hero.
• In The Last House on the Left, the sheriff and his deputy are incompetent buffoons. They even buy into Krug's half-assed alibi about being a passing preacher. And when they hear of Mari's kidnapping, they not only find out where she is located, but also that they were there a few minutes ago. Oh, and they were late to the Roaring Rampage of Revenge Party.
• Last Train from Gun Hill: The Sheriff of Gun Hill knows which side his bread is buttered on, and refuses to help Morgan serve his two warrants.
  Sheriff Bartlett: Far as I'm concerned, you can go out on the street and get yourself killed anytime you want to, but, you know something, 40 years from now the weeds'll grow just as pretty on my grave as they will on yours. Nobody'll even remember that I was yellow and you died like a fool. That's your long view, son. Always take the long view.

M-S

• In The Mad Miss Manton, Melsa Manton does all the investigating work, and doesn’t really get credit for finding out who the murderer is.
• Manos: The Hands of Fate may be one of the most credibility-stretching examples. The police, who spend most their time harassing a young couple at Make-Out Point, finally hear a gunshot fired by the protagonists, who are being chased through the desert by an insane cult. The cops don't get four feet away from their car before giving up and deciding that the gun was probably fired somewhere in Mexico and that it doesn't concern them.
  "Sound does travel a long way at night."
• The cops in Memories of Murder are pretty useless when trying to catch the serial killer roaming the countryside, though the local people aren't much help either.
• A single police car with two officers is able to break up a gang fight in Miami Connection followed by the two officers not taking two steps from the car and asking, "Where did everybody go?" They then declare that "Someday, they'll get rid of all the gangs in central Florida," drive away, and are never seen again.
• The campus cops at Balboa University in M.F.A. certainly are. One of them allows Noelle to walk into the storeroom at police headquarters and walk out with confidential case files. The only crime they manage to stop is Noelle's attempt to murder Calvin, and the cop in question only discovers that because the girl he was trying to impress at the time points out the fresh blood stain on the ground. Detective Kennedy from the city police is a different kettle of fish and becomes an Inspector Javert in his pursuit of the Campus Killer.
• In the B-movie pastiche Monster!, the mentor instructs his successor that the police will never show up until after the monster is defeated nor will they believe any attempts to help them. In the end, after The Hero dunks the monster in a vat of liquid nitrogen, he wonders where the cops are and realizes that it must still be alive. After defeating it one more time, the cops finally show up. Justified and Enforced, as the curse on the town forces it to abide by monster movie rules when the title monster is active, including this trope.
• Also the schtick of The Naked Gun movies for the most part. Lt.Drebin does get his man in the end, but getting there is a comedy of errors.
• National Security: After spending 6 months in jail, former cop Hank Rafferty discovers that, in his absence, the investigation into the warehouse break-in, during which his partner was killed, hasn't moved an inch (this, at least, can be justified by The Reveal that the detective in charge of the investigation is in cahoots with the robbers). Hank and Earl end up breaking the case wide open in a few days. The other aspect is that the LAPD seems more willing to throw one of its own to the wolves rather than risk a riot in the city over something that has, at best, questionable evidence.
• Big time in Neighbors. They don't respond to a noise complaint and the responding officer actually warns the frat that they got a complaint. Though it is at least partly the fault of the Radners as they lie outright about making an anonymous complaint and then immediately get caught in another lie about partying with the frat the previous evening.
• Night of the Dribbler: The police officers assigned to investigating the attacks on Watergate's basketball team don't seem the most competent of cops. They seem to completely ignore glaringly obvious suspects in favour of chasing after seemingly-esoteric leads. In the end, though, they reveal that they DID manage to deduce who the Dribbler is.
• No Country for Old Men 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 Tommy Lee Jones. 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 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.
• The North Avenue Irregulars implies that the local police don't mind The Mafia being so prevalent in the town of North Haven.
• Justified in Open Range, as it's established early on the Big Bad has the local marshal and his deputies in his pocket, and when it's suggested that the heroes send a telograph to the federal authorities, Charlie points out they're far enough on frontier that even if they sent someone immediately, it could take a week for them to get there. And that's with good weather, and their expecting a severe storm...
• The Other Guys both parodies and plays this straight, then again they play it so straight it might also be parody. The chief repeatedly shuts the guys' investigation down and ignores all of the evidence they're getting because he told them not to investigate anymore. Subverted because Da Chief actually does know full well that there is something going on. In fact, he just wants to keep the two titular guys away from the danger zone (he is probably the most timorous Chief you'll ever see in modern media). In the end, they actually convince him to help them for a change and to support them in their pursuit. He does.
• Pain & Gain: The Miami police write Kershaw's story off as "delusional alcoholism" and don't do anything about it. Even after Ed Du Bois presents a lot of evidence to them, they don't take any action because they're afraid it would make them look bad for ignoring Kershaw before. It isn't until after the Sun Gym gang claims 2 more victims that the police try to arrest them. Then averted when they finally take action, as they're able to apprehend the gang in short order without a lot of trouble.
• Played with in Jodie Foster's movie Panic Room, the protagonist calls 911 only to be put on hold. When the police do finally show up, it's because her worried ex husband called them. And still the cops are dissuaded from sticking around, though that's only because she is the one to tell them it was a false alarm, and one of the officers suspects (correctly) that she is under duress.
• Parallels: When Ronan and Beatrix try to report their father missing, they are given the old "has to be missing for 24 hours" line, which isn't true in Real Life. However, it is pointed out there's no evidence of foul play, plus he gets reported for patrols to look out for, so it's somewhat subverted.
• In The Phenix City Story, amajor obstacle in Patterson's pursuit of justice is that the Phenix City police, if not actively complicit in the mob's activities, at least consistently look the other way.
• In Passenger 57, law enforcement fails on every level. The FBI had the bright idea of transporting an international terrorist known for hijacking planes on a jumbo jet full of civilians. After The Hero John Cutter manages to force an emergency landing, local police try to arrest him but give the terrorists everything they want, including the opportunity to escape and kill even more people. If that weren't bad enough, Da Chief was a Glory Hound and refused to get the feds involved until things had already escalated.
• The Perfect Weapon (1991): Jeff's brother Adam is a cop but not a particularly competent one. He draws his gun on his own brother when frustrated, and doesn't even bother to handcuff a dangerous suspect properly with hands behind his back.
• Subverted in Pineapple Express. The heroes avoid going to the police because one of the villains is a cop. When Seth Rogen gets arrested, he finally spills his guts to the arresting officer, who immediately believes his implausible story and vows to crack the case. After getting "rescued" from the cop, Rogen berates his friend for ruining everything.
• The premise of the Police Academy movies. Somewhat subverted though, as the bad guys are even more incompetent.
• In Poor Pretty Eddie, Liz tells Sheriff Orville that Eddie raped her, but Orville is more interested in making her recount lurid details and forcing her to show the evidence than he is in seeking justice.
• The Power of the Press: There are cops already at the crime scene, standing by the corpse and guarding the front door, preventing Clem from getting in. But nobody bothers to search the house or post a guard by the back window, which is how Jane is able to climb out and escape.
• The opening sequence of Predator 2 had the LAPD having a gunfight with a much smaller group of Colombian drug dealers and the police were the ones who were defeated. Justified because the drug gang had better weapons, including grenade launchers, while the police were limited to pistols and shotguns. They were also holed up in a better position. And what's worse, the SWAT-team wasn't available because they were already engaged in a similar situation elsewhere.
• Taken to ludicrous extremes in the Prom Night (2008) remake: a police department cannot prevent a former high school teacher armed only with a knife from murdering several people despite knowing exactly where he's going. He also manages to evade them all... by putting on a cap.
• The Purge Universe: Justified. One of the rules behind The Purge is that the police cannot respond to any calls for 12 hours. As a result, if you get into trouble, you're on your own.
• In Race with the Devil, Sheriff Taylor and his deputies are in league with the cultists, and are covering up their act of Human Sacrifice.
• This is brought up in Rambo: Last Blood as the reason why Rambo is the only one who can rescue Gabriela from the Human Traffickers. Cops can't cross the border, while down in Mexico, they don't do shit since they're on the traffickers' payroll.
• Rampage (2009):
  • Justified. Bill's first act is to take out the police station so that there's nobody to stop his rampage.
  • Played completely straight in the sequel. At this point Bill takes out entire SWAT teams and anti-terrorist units because he's The Chessmaster.
  • The third film continues this, though at least then it's helped by him having a mole in the FBI unit.
• [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 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.
• The Return of the Living Dead: In this zombie film, here the zombies are immune to bullets and the police are easily outnumbered and lacking the means to kill the zombies, and they end up getting their own brains devoured before they could try to save the main cast.
• Return of the Scarecrow: People start calling into the sheriff office to report on the scarecrow's attacks. However, Sheriff Johnston is at home with his family, and Deputy Morgan is understandably skeptical of reports of scarecrow attacks.
• If the low-budget sci-fi movie R.O.T.O.R. is to be believed, the police will not be able to save you from a killer homicidal robot if it's not in their jurisdiction.
• In Run Lola Run, 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 shell-shocked, only for a policeman to tackle her aside, having mistaken her for an innocent bystander or simply the cleaning lady, due to the trash bag in her hand. Cause there's no way the money could be held in a trash bag.
• Run Sweetheart Run: Cherie runs away from Ethan's home and tries to get help after his initial attack. She finally comes across two women and asks to borrow their phone or at least to call 911. An officer arrives, sees the state she is in (barefoot, visible lacerations, her dress torn, tear-streaked makeup) and takes her to the station to book her for public intoxication. Later they allow Ethan to come into her cell, despite her crying out that she does not want him to come in.
• Saw:
  • Played with most of the time. The Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI aren't necessarily incompetent and are always active in the Jigsaw case, but they never manage to capture any of the Jigsaw killers and accomplices they know about (only getting their corpses after being killed by someone else), or even discover certain Closed Circles like the Nerve Gas House (which includes the series' infamous Bathroom) and the barn (which somehow went unnoticed for over a decade).
  • Justified in Spiral, where it's shown that the department has had plenty of Dirty Cops and a long history of Police Brutality, especially after Zeke turned in Pete for murdering a witness. This not only worsens the department's efforts to capture the Spiral Killer, but also left many past crimes without resolution.
• Zig-zagged throughout the Scream series. 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.
  • In Scream, during the finale, the only cop present—Dewey—is taken out very quickly, and it's Sidney and Gail that put an end to everything.
  • In Scream 2, the police hold a single press conference, and only show up again at the end after everything has been settled. By Sidney and Gail again.
  • In Scream 3, police are more prevalent, but again, the only cop on the scene is taken out rather quickly, and Sidney, Gail and Dewey (no longer a cop) deal with it.
  • In Scream 4, the police have a strong presence (most likely due to being under Dewey's command, given he's dealt with this several times before) but are nowhere to be seen when several deaths occur.
• In Searching, this is zigzagged. When David first reports Margot's disappearance, he discovers that in California where he lives, has a statistic of resolved missing person cases below 50%, implying the police are ineffective at finding missing people. When Vick, a dedicated detective, is put on the case, David is somewhat more reassured. However, as the case goes on, David's personal investigation manages to make any progress at finding Margot with Detective Vick providing some clues here and there. There is a reason for the uselessness because Detective Vick was behind it all. Her son was the one behind Margot's disappearance and she was covering for him and leaving fake clues for David to chase and orchestrate the case to end prematurely. When David finds out, he calls a squad of police to arrest Vick and later assist him with rescuing Margot once her location was found.
• In Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend, Sheriff Massey is in the pocket of Eb Clark, and turns a blind eye to the banditry of Clark's men. However, even when he is trying to do his job on behalf of Clark, he is still incompetent.
• Shooter: While the authorities' attempts to track down Swagger are done by the book, the most extreme example of this trope is Officer Kyle Timmons of the Philadelphia Police Department, who was hired by The Conspiracy to help frame Swagger for the Archbishop's murder. Timmons' part was to pose as Swagger's police liaison and then shoot him whilst the real killer shot the archbishop, then he'd make the report and Swagger would be framed. Simple right? Except despite the kill being literally set up for him, with Swagger having his back turned and his guard down, Timmons proves so inept that he botches the kill and Swagger manages to escape. Naturally, the spooks who organised the set up are pissed:
  CIA Agent: "How could you miss?! How could you fucking miss??!!"
• Inspector Atherly Jones in The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case makes most portrayals of Lestrade look like a member of Mensa. His first solution to the murder would, as Holmes points out, have involved the dead man getting of his chair, locking the door and sitting down again. He also arrested half the Sholto household on suspicion of being involved in the murder before even viewing the crime scene (causing Watson to later comment that he and Holmes are lucky they weren't arrested, too). This was taken directly from the book the film was based off of.
• In Silent Night (2012), Sheriff Cooper is ridiculously incompetent and yet still gives sermons about the police work. Makes you wonder how he became sheriff. Subverted by Deputy Bradimore.
• Subverted in the Die Hard-on-a-bus film Speed where the police are actually competent at helping out the protagonist, forming an escort to prevent collisions, mapping out a survivable route with the help of a police captain from a chopper and blocking off roads so the bus won't explode. It helps that the protagonist is another cop, but that just goes towards subversion, too. The S.W.A.T. officers provide the exception; they try to assist the woman off the bus while on the highway, despite knowing that the killer is watching and told them explicitly not to do that.
• Taken to very dangerous extremes in Small Soldiers. Not only do the police refuse to believe Christy about the Commando Elites when she calls 911 and accuse her of making a nuisance call, but when she tries to make them come by admitting she made a nuisance call (a rather serious crime in itself) they simply hang up.
• In Spider-Man 2 the titular hero's 10-Minute Retirement caused the crime rate in NY to skyrocket by astounding 75%. That's right. One man, albeit a superpowered one, managed to contain almost as much crime activity as the whole NYPD did. Like Batman before him it was more the knowledge that Spider-Man was out there that kept most of the lower-level criminals at home, leaving only guys like the Green Goblin and Doc Oc to take over. Once word gets out that Spidey is gone (thank-you, Mr. Jameson) they come out of the woodwork and crime skyrockets, with the press inflating the figures to sell more papers.
• In Superbad the two cops are a good deal less mature than the teenage protagonists.
• Parodied and played straight in Super Troopers. The Highway Patrolmen are useless because they're just goofing around. The local police are useless because they're actually in on the drug ring.

T-Z

• In the WWII 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 T-34-85 medium tank and the former only has a bolt-action rifle.
• Taxi:
  • The police forces of Marseille are completely incompetent except for Petra. It says a lot about their boss' abilities that in the third installment he talked about his brother, who copied one part of the exam wrong from him, got zero points and thus couldn't become a police officer.
  • The first movie plays the trope differently: Most of the cops except Emilien are decent enough, they are just outside the area of expertise to catch those particular crooks. The chief is peculiar... but not outright incompetent, the implication being that the pressure of this crime wave is getting to him. The sequels make the cops outright dumb and dangerous: Only Petra is in any way competent, and the cops are more dangerous to the city than the criminals themselves.
  • In the fourth film, Petra and the French Intelligence stage a Batman Gambit using the cops' incompetence.
• Terminator movie series:
  • Respectfully downplayed in The Terminator. The police are intelligent, resourceful, and loaded with enough firepower to stop anything that isn't a Nigh Invulnerable Cyborg.
  • Similarly downplayed in the sequel where the SWAT response to the attack on Cyberdyne was to effectively surround the place, effectively move right in, and almost manage to effectively neutralize the protagonists. Again, it only fails because they're facing a literal killing machine who's immune to tear gas and bullets, and even then they manage to take down Miles Dyson.
  • Downplayed for a third time in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines where the detectives working on Catherine disappearance seem quite competent. And of course the graveyard scene, in which the police surrounds the tomb and throws inside smoke grenades with tear gas. Then they send in the SWAT team with gas masks. Probably it would have worked if only they weren't facing a killer machine for a third time in the series. Poor cops. Well, they were about to die anyway...
• In The Terror of Tiny Town, the sheriff is being blackmailed by the Big Bad Bat Haines to turn a blind eye to all of Haines' crimes, effectively letting Haines ride roughshod over the whole county.
• In Trick 'r Treat, when Mr. Kreeg is being menaced by the evil spirit Sam, he calls 911...and is immediately put on hold. Sam then cuts the line, and no patrol cars or other emergency response are ever dispatched to the location of the call to check up.
• In Truth or Dare (2017), the police refuse to believe that the deaths are anything but teenage misadventure.
• Two-Minute Warning: Police officers are depicted as competent and determined to stop the sniper who has hidden in one of the towers of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during a football game without causing casualties. But they fail spectacularly.
• Upgrade: Three months after the murder of Grey's wife, Detective Cortez has made zero progress on the case despite having drone footage of the crime (drones that are evidently not programmed to sweep around to get more useful footage) and one of the assailants even removing his mask during the act. It's later implied she actually interrogated the killers, but released them for insufficient evidence. Apparently, STEM is capable of identifying things the police computers can't. She does catch onto Grey immediately when he begins hunting the killers, but he leaves so many mountains of evidence that she'd have to actively try not to catch him. It doesn't help that Cortez is killed at the end with no chance against the superpowered STEM, but she failed to bring backup either.
• In Utøya: July 22, a reenactment of the 2011 Norway Attacks (which happened 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 Truth in Television — 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 including Kaja herself.
• In WarGames Zig-zagged with the portray of the the FBI. While the are able to arrest him quite quickly, they are convinced that he is a Soviet agent rather than a computer hacker. They point out that he quite nicely fits the profile: he has few friends, is alienated from his parents and is an intelligent underachiever. Though in their defense, they had no way of knowing that the computer program he had dialed into was really sentient. So when he appeared to reconnect to it, it looked like he was still trying to do something even after having realized what he had done, when it had actually called him.
• Where the Sidewalk Ends: The policemen are ready to pin a murder on an innocent man with only circumstantial evidence.
• Wild River: The local Sheriff zigzags this. He's mildly helpful and supportive to the TVA (which is giving poor black locals jobs and working to eliminate a source of dangerous flooding), while also displaying some sympathy for how Ella will be displaced by the Railroad Plot. Then, in the climax, he spends several minutes watching Bailey and his racist cronies wreck Chuck's house and assault Chuck and Carol before intervening, although his (mild) intervention does stop things from getting worse.
• The World of Kanako: While Akikazu and Aikawa stand out as they are highly sociopathic, there's much more to it:
  • Detective Asai is completely ineffective as cop and just visits crime scenes whenever he feels like it. He doesn't stop Akikazu from finding Kanako but is no help in any way either. He always keeps his smile and his lollipop however.
  • When Ogata and the narrator are bullied, the police are nowhere to be seen and do not care in the slightest.
• This trope is pretty much a staple of Lifetime movies, but The Wrong Cheerleader has some ludicrous examples even by their standards.
  • Detective Wilson refuses to take action against creepy psycho Rob giving an argument that cyber stalking is too tricky to investigate. Seems the local police are still living in the 20th century.
  • In one particularly idiotic statement, the detective suggests ignoring minor offences and waiting for Rob to kill someone before taking action.
    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.
• Wrong Turn has a policeman sent to investigate the cannibal rednecks who doesn't survive, and during the credits another is seen about to be attacked. The latter can count as "police are lazy", as summed up by a review of the series:
  Imagine the scene: a truck arrives at the police station with two traumatized teens, who come to the sheriff and say "We were in the woods where there were three guys killing and eating people, they've been doing this for years, there's a graveyard of old Fords, Jeffrey Dahmer ain't got shit on them! They killed our friends, they killed even the cop you sent to investigate, and we don't know if they're dead! Better call the Army, the Coast Guard, the Mounties, the guys are dangerous!". And the sheriff just reacts with "Alright, send in George."
• In You Might Be the Killer, Chuck asks why Sam called her with help for the slasher attacking the camp rather than calling the police. Sam says that the local sheriff is an elderly man who doesn't answer his phone at night.
• Zodiac deconstructs this trope pretty well. It's not that the SFPD are incompetent, per se — 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: overlapping jurisdictions among different departments, the lack of hard evidence, adverse media coverage, a panicky public, and just plain bad luck.

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