I'm in Germany, and I'm pretty OK with our police. Most officers I've met were friendly, it just happens to be their job to have to do unpopular things at times.
As a Canadian visiting Berlin, I was blown away by the way police carried themselves. At one point I was walking up to Nollendorfplatz station and I see a woman, looking heavily intoxicated and enraged, chasing around a police officer and hitting him with her purse as a handful more looked on. Where I come from (and having only traveled to the US before, where I'd been) this only ends one way... but shockingly the officers were standing around and laughing. The target of the woman's aggression was running in a circle comically as if Yakety Sax was playing in the background.