Maybe depends on where you live. GP's experience rings true after living in SF for a decade. I've had a friend get punched in broad daylight by a homeless person, black eye and everything, and the cops responded "what do you want me to do?" Also know many startups with offices broken into, laptops stolen. Cops show up 4 hours later and say they probably won't recover the goods. When asked if camera footage would have helped, the answer is no - but you can stick up some fake ones as a deterrent.
So what do you want them to do? Interview every homeless person to find the culprit? What's the practical solution using reasonable resources?
Also most of the problems are due to a lack of prosecution (in the SF area). Police can't do much if criminals just get immediately released without consequence.
We could both give a description of the person, location where it happened, and there were many witnesses. Typical stuff cops ask on TV. I'm not face blind to homeless people.
TV isn't anything like real life. Was there photo or video surveillance? If not, how good was the description? Was the perpetrator still near the location? How many people do you need to search to find a match? How many cops and how much time do you expect to be assigned to this?
Like I said, even if the police do find and arrest this person, it's still up to the courts to prosecute. It's a lot of work between the court proceedings with testimonies and evaluations to get a conviction. Some regions like California are very reluctant to bring charges and just release them instead, which is why police will avoid dealing with the matter in the first place.
I am not sure what you are arguing for. We should not have asked a police for help because we should have known that their job is hard to do efficiently and their workplace contains office politics?
That's their problem, not mine. As far as I'm concerned, police should do what they say they do on the tin. What happened was my friend got punched in the face and what we wanted was for the police to at least make it appear like they were interested in reducing the ambient amount of face punchings in their jurisdiction.
I'm arguing against the many comments in this thread that called the police a "worthless institution" because of some anecdotes, which is analogous to saying "sql is slow" because you particular query is slow; instead both subjects require thought about realistic scenarios and expectations to understand why things are the way they are.
> "appear like they were interested"
They're interested but they're not there to appease. As I already said several times before, police need laws and courts to back them up or their work is ineffective. You should contact your maylor and local DA about why that jurisdiction has so many face punchings by the homeless in the first place.
