I'm not even saying you're wrong necessarily, but the whole situation is fucking cooked.
How do we learn to trust each other again?
The effects only get more pronounced in a society where literally every lunatic could have a gun and could therefore murder you at the drop of a hat. Trusting a strange situation will mean your death, eventually. It's inevitable.
This is therefore not a matter of distrust, because you don't need faith or trust to know certain things about the transformative effect this would have on people. They live under mortal threat every second they're outside in uniform. They're going to be monstrous.
They're ultimately good guys (well, as good as any random guy is, not worse not better) but their experience of the society turns them into distrustful, clanic semi-sociopaths. The fear of other people reactions is ingrained.
The one that marked me is that they were afraid of local teens chatting up with our teens and learning they were police children, and passed that fear to all kids by saying extremely weird and violent shit they probably believed, but were ultimately lies. They wanted the children, most of them orphans, to avoid talking to regular kids outside of the camp, and lie if they did.
Not bad guys inherently, but clearly fucked up by their job.
If you never found the child's parents, you'd have to call CPS. Being prevented from finding the child's parents, just necessitates you move that step forward.
Of course, it's not 'your job' so technically you could abandon the child at any point but it does feel a bit heartless to give a kid hope, then say 'meh you're on your own, this is too troublesome'. As for just leaving the child with others who are complaining, I doubt that's a good idea. They were making no move to help, and bystander effect will probably keep them from ever doing a thing.