No.
You said it, dude. I am honestly frightened in ANY encounter I have with the police, and the worst thing on my record is a few speeding tickets. I do my best to keep my in-person interactions with the cops to an absolute minimum. With some of them, if they happen to having a bad day, it can get really bad really fast, over something very trivial. They scare me, and any conversation with them is generally a waste of my time anyway, in my experience.
I like this… ↑↑↑ 
No I do not trust cops. I have learned they are paid professional liars. It is the SJPD that convinced me of that. I want to keep the story short but I had an incident with the PD. Every officer that I talked to lied to me with a straight face even when it would have been better to tell me the truth. took some work and a lawyer and we got the truth. Another thing I learned the Internal affairs department is not the “rat squad”, but the “White wash squad”.
Police think they are exempt. My sister in law has a friend who is CHP. She was traveling with her in her family car. Her friend was traveling over 90 MPH. When my sister in law asked her to slow down. The CHP officer answer was why don’t you know we are exempt.
I was passed by a convoy of CHP officers doing over 90 MPH on highway 280. With 4 officers in each car they were going to some sort of meeting.
When I coached youth soccer one of the refs bragged that he had not read the rule book in over three years. And every year there are changes to some of the rules. When he refed a game he made so many bad calls, some for you land some against you. He did not really know the rules of the game. But as an officer he thought it did not matter he could make the rules up.
It starts small the traffic laws don’t matter to me.
Not telling the truth because it might embarrass a fellow officer is OK.
Then another small step, and a little larger step.
No I do not trust cops.
And I am not a liberal. More of a conservative. I am someone that 4 years ago would have said anyone getting in trouble with the cops had it coming.
About Fergueon. Not a gentle giant but a thug. Even the news admits that he robed the store before getting stopped. So it was not an sweet kid that was shot but a thug got shot. Now did the officer follow procedure? And if he had would Michael still be alive and in jail? We don’t know. But the riots are going to yield nothing good. And the honest question about police actions is going to be lost.
There are cops in my local area that I trust. But I do not trust the police as an institution. For that to happen, I would need to see better responses to the crooked cops that are reported, and a lot more respect from them towards their fellow man, even while on the job. Plus I know that lying is part of their job description. How can you trust someone who lies, and whose job is to try to find anything they can use against you?
Yes I trust the police in NZ and indeed in Canada, Oz, the UK, Japan, most of Europe. Actually most places.
I never felt threatened or unsafe when around police in the USA.
Spanish citizen, living in the Netherlands.
I trust the Dutch police. In my years living here, I have not heard of police brutality or misconduct, generally speaking.
As to the Spanish police, my childhood included the last years of the Franco regime. At the time, “los grises” (“the gray ones”, nickname for the police due to the color of their uniforms) were generally feared and hated (*).
After Franco died the police went through a “cleansing process”, so to speak. So, although many people still mistrust the Spanish police, I would say that, in comparison to their Francoist ancestors, they are definitely nicer and much better behaved.
Doesn’t mean that they are paragons of virtue, but definitely much more palatable than before.
(*) Trivia: Nowadays, Spanish city police wears blue uniforms. Their nickname nowadays is “the Smurfs” 
I must say that “the gray ones” sounds way more ominous…
It’s mixed.
I am aware of some cases where the police department of a small city or town was corrupt but a new police chief came in and cleaned it up by just setting a high standard and firing the bad apples. I think far too often police ranks attract the schoolyard bullies who then are given a gun and told they can hurt others.
But then my sons best friends father is a police officer and I pretty much trust him. I’ve seen them do a great job in cleaning up drug dealings and breaking up car theft rings.
Because of some volunteer work I do, I’ve sat in on more police interviews than most people have the chance to do (other than police and offenders, obviously) - maybe 40 or so over the last few years, at a rough estimate. These are all in regional Australian police stations: this is going to tilt my experience and opinion, obviously.
Some of the interviews have been very quick and business-like; some have been rather emotionally fraught. Most of the time, the police have been professional; I can think of maybe five times where they’ve fallen short, to some degree or other–a prisoner left in handcuffs when they should have been released, a copper not knowing procedure (or “not knowing” to make their job easier), a copper losing his temper and shouting at a person in custody (but I will say, there was some provocation), a couple of allegations of undue force while arresting someone.
The better coppers I’ve met have been in the game because they genuinely want to help people. The average coppers I’ve met with have just wanted to do their jobs and go home afterwards (this can have its downsides–think shortcuts and corners cut). A few have been unpleasant to deal with.
In general, if the police pulled me over, I’d expect to be treated fairly–but I’m also white, middle class, sneakin’ up on middle-aged, and driving a nice car. My experience is a long way from being everyone else’s.
I don’t trust them at all, and regard them as a necessary evil. Even ignoring issues specific to Ferguson & modern day America, it’s a simple fact that police officer is a position of power, and power proverbially corrupts.
Basically my position. I’ve felt for a while that there were three basic types of police officers: those who want to serve the public good http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/living/ferguson-protest-hug/index.html?hpt=hp_t1]like this one), those who want a job, and those who want power/authority. The latter, while few in number, are the ones most likely to abuse their authority and the ones most likely to give a bad impression of the entire police force.
Overall I trust them - but not blindly/100%. I will not volunteer information during a traffic stop, and I will never consent to warrantless searches.
I trust cops, and I’m a minority American.
Nope, on the advice of several friends who are “good cops” I do not trust the police in general.
I am a 60 year old white male law-abiding citizen, and I do not trust the police where I live or anywhere else. I view every interaction with the police as an opportunity to have my day or life ruined by an asshole with too much power. I know some very nice police officers, I don’t think that all cops are jerks, but the things that they can arbitrarily do to people are frightening to me.
I’m in line with this answer. Whether I trust them or not, depends on how they happen upon a situation. As an institution, generally no, I don’t.
Thankfully, I do my best to not get their attention, and for the most part it works (nothing actionable, anyway, usually just profiling), but I’m on the fence about their response. I’ve had/witnessed both good and bad.
In general, I would say that trust the police in the US areas I travel to ( Northern California and Texas ). If I have a concern about police in the US it is around their training. I do wonder about their rules of engagement and what triggers the use of deadly force. Perhaps the officer in the Michael Brown case could have done something different.
All authority should be viewed with a strong sense of distrust. We should always keep an eye on the people we pay to exercise that authority, the same way we check the work we pay anyone else for. They work for us. We should expect to be given the chance to evaluate their work in some form and for problems to be corrected. How likely is it that each and every single graduate of the police academy is going to be a paragon good will and trust?
Police work is messy work but no matter how messy or difficult the job, we have to be able to separate the good from the bad. It seems to me that the police would rather not be rated on their job performance and I can’t trust authorities who have no check on their power.
Most cops I’ve met are decent people. I’m sure most Nazis and Confederates were decent people, too, because in general, most people are.
But the institutions they belong to are fundamentally corrupt, evil, unjust and untrustworthy.
I’m still close to a retired Seargent that was a neighbor once. I took him some smoked brisket recently when his wife passed and we sat in his living room for hours sipping whiskey and sharing our reasonably similar thoghts on the world and its inhabitants.
I’ve also been dragged handcuffed behind a patrol car by three cops, had my head rammed into the bumper and told to “Eat chrome, fucker.”
Which “police” is it of which you speak?
No, I don’t.