[majos]

Police do have such a legal obligation. The whole point of a police force is to maintain public safety. You might argue that this has been corrupted into “arrest people” by quotas or bad culture or civil forfeiture or revenue-based policing or whatever, but their mission statement is fundamentally about keeping people safe. That’s totally different from a for-profit search engine.

[threatofrain]

Where does this legal obligation come from? State law? The constitution? Is the mission of an organization the slogan they put on cars or websites?

Expecting police to be stewards of the community is the same as expecting ICANN to be stewards of the web — it’s a lot of unchecked moral assumptions for how things are supposed to work, rather than structuring a result to happen. It’s also a failure to discuss the imperatives created by who feeds whom, and why moral presumption of police workings should matter in the face of that.

Americans believe it is the structure of their federal government which generates stressful imperatives for different bodies to behave “well”. What structure guides any faith or optimism that police will be stewards of the community?

Have American police been generating a lot of faith and optimism recently?

[mandelbrotwurst]

Are you citing the non-binding "protect and serve" motto, or something else? Enforcing the law isn't necessarily about keeping people safe - whether that's true depends on what the laws are.