It depends on the kind of police officer, although most of them represent something that I find distasteful: the enforcement of many unnecessary laws that restrict my personal freedom in ways that shouldn't be anyone else's business.
I have had both good and bad experiences with the police.
Good experiences:
On at least three occasions, I have been offered rides by concerned officers.
1.Once was when a friend's car broke down, back when we were in college. We were stranded without a phone, and a police officer gave us a ride back to the school.
2.Once was when I got stranded in the snow in the middle of the night,when I was living in the mountains, and the concerned officer actually tracked me by my footprints in order to make sure I was safe.
3.Once was when I was out walking for miles and miles without any destination in mind, and the officer thought I might be lost. I didn't take him up on his ride offer, but it was nice of him to worry about me.
Some of them genuinely care about people. During the second ride, with the one who rescued me on the snowy night, I was able to have a long conversation about his reasons for choosing that profession, and he said that it was because he felt that it was where he had the greatest potential to help people. He had it in his nature to be protective of others, and was obviously an idealist.
Then there are the ones who are only in it for the power, or the ones who are incompetent.
When I was in Portland, a violent meth-addicted ex-roommate broke into my apartment while I was there, by smashing through a reinforced window with a two-by-four. As he was pounding at the glass, I quietly hid in the kitchen and called the police, because I wasn't sure if he was going to kill me once he got in, or if running away would do any good. As he got closer to breaking through, I hung up so he wouldn't know I had called them. I wanted him to think that someone else had seen him, so I wouldn't be blamed. They took their time getting there, which is expected because of how much crime there was in the area. By the time they made it, my ex-roommate had gotten in and was behaving in a threatening manner. The knock at the door came just in time. Just before I opened the door for the police, the ex-roommate cut open the back of my couch and was hiding in it. Before climbing inside of the couch, he was whispering threats and told me not to say anything to the cops. They stood at the door and the first thing they asked was, "Is he still here?" to which I responded with a lie, knowing I would be overheard, and that it was extremely dangerous to tell the police anything around someone whose friends were known to gut people with knives for less. I attempted to signal the police nonverbally, nodding while I said no, and pointing, to reveal his location. They didn't catch on. I had to walk out into the hallway to avoid being overheard. That was when I told them that he was hiding in the couch, and that I was afraid of talking to them in front of him because he was dangerous. By the time we got back to the room, he was gone again. The police saw where the couch had been cut, and where the window had been broken, but saw no sign of my ex-roommate. He faced no consequences because they had let him escape.
Worse horror stories about the Portland police, which I am sure were true because they were told to me by honest friends, include tales of people being busted with a bag of pot and told that they had a choice between letting the cops beat them up, or going to jail. When they selected the beating, they were beaten, then taken to jail anyhow. This happened to no fewer than three of my friends, who didn't stay in jail for very long, but still felt betrayed.
They were also known to beat up homeless people for sleeping on benches or in doorways, which happened to one of my friends.
I heard that they would also sometimes handcuff female runaways and rape them, knowing their authority would make them unlikely to suffer any consequences. This happened to a friend of a friend.
Newspapers showed several stories about Portland police killing people who weren't armed, and the ones they most frequently targeted were the mentally ill, regardless of age. They killed one mentally ill teenager whose mother had called them to control him while he was having a temper tantrum, and shot another teen who was running around naked and obviously had no hidden weapons on him. These were both white kids, but usually they were more likely to shoot if the person they were after was black, regardless of gender or age, and because this was publicly known, many people of all races held protests over it.
One of my friends, who was a friendly giant of a man, said that he was still traumatized by an encounter with the police. It happened when he was just doing his usual thing, digging through trash cans for soda cans to sell back to the stores, which was how he earned his living, and for no apparent reason they freaked out on him, pointed a gun at his head, and were quite hostile with him. He says that he thinks they must have mistaken him for someone else, but I'm not so sure. The Portland police have a bad reputation of messing with the poor for sadistic purposes.
I feel ambivalent about police, because there are times when they are necessary or useful. More often, they are unpredictable and make me feel anxious. I don't trust them until I know them personally, as with anyone else.
I feel like I have to hide myself from them in most ways, though, and am cautious of what I say around them, just in case I accidentally admit to doing something I didn't know was illegal, or something that I know is illegal but don't think of as important.