Re: So strictly speaking...
Many years ago I was driving home in the early hours after visiting a friend. On the road through suburbia was a concrete lamppost, horizontal, lying across (the other) half of the road. It was waiting to cause an accident.
Being young (early 20s) my immediate reaction was to stop and call the police from a 'phone box. They asked me to wait. I did. Ten minutes later a police car arrived. I expected them to thank me for reporting it and waiting. Instead they gave a quick glance at the concrete obstruction then grilled me for 10 minutes about where I had been, was going, why. Looked all around my car. Made me open the boot.
Then they let me drive home.
I felt as if I had been treated as a criminal rather than a well-meaning, reponsible citizen. It didn't stop me being on the side of the police. I've known a couple and they have to deal with some pretty terrible stuff sometimes. It just wasn't the polite, Dixon of Dock Green approach that my grandfather had believed in and passed on to me when I was young.
Years later, the unpleasant taste still lingers, faintly. More recent events, like the video of the innocent old guy violently hit and pushed over in London a few years ago, who subsequently died, leave a fresher, ranker taste. I don't expect every law enforcer to be an angel, though I hope most have high standards suited to their role. But I do expect the ruling, controlling powers to distinguish accurately between "good" and "bad" actions and to act accordingly; not treating their paymasters, citizens, as criminals by default and not dealing with their own bad apples by closing ranks, which leads to a "We're in control; we can get away with most things" culture.
When the majority of innocent, well-intentioned citizens are regarded as criminals in the first instance I expect many end up thinking, "Why should I bother and suffer for trying to act responsibly?"
Police, I expect, are mostly doing a good job and sometimes trying to maintain their own sanity when travelling on the darker pathways of society.
Politicians, however, who make and rant about laws, often with seemingly little comprehension of the nitty-gritty contexts, but with great expertise in fields such as "spin", the finer points of expense claims and milking the media for every possible vote-winning sound-bite, rarely seem to have much of the darker side of life to deal with, compassionately and wisely. They seem, often, to be experts only in their own careers and future incomes and those of their families, friends (*) and business backers.
(*) Mostly the sort of "Et tu Brute" friends that Julius Caesar had. Such is the world they chose to inhabit.