If the videos online are any indicator, police do a lot more than simply enforce the law: they regularly harass and intimidate anyone behaving in ways that are nonstandard (including simply existing while being a minority or poor) even if no laws are being broken, and suffer no consequences whatsoever for such illegal and often violent conduct.

This is presumably what some people want, but in general the police as protectors of the status quo is, in my view, a bad thing. The status quo sucks and changing it isn't illegal—yet the cops in the US will treat you as it it were.

It's a bad and fiercely unamerican system.