[eitally]

The problem is that looking at national numbers is not representative of most people's experience. For example, my "town" of 140,000 (Cary, NC) has only had one murder in the past five years and is currently listed as the safest city in the US with population between 100,000-500,000 (http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/10/29/3323828/cary-claims-l...). I personally mostly ignore the police but keep them in mind as a civic resource to leverage for answers about things I don't know how to find out any other way. In a small, safe city, calling the non-emergency line can be a useful source of information. Heck, the electric service powering my neighborhood is run by the neighboring town of Apex, and their off-hours emergency line redirects to the Apex police department, who presumably handle coordinating outage reports with the emergency techs and line workers. I'm not trying to claim things are Andy-Griffith-in-Mayberry, but it's certainly closer to that than the other extreme.

Besides actual skewing, you have localized situations where the relationship of the police to the citizens (and media) is personal, friendly, helpful, and generally constructive. For every "stop and frisk" type story there's a cop helping a stranded single mother change a tire, etc.