I'm fairly quick to point out the police are by and large useless, but its not down to the cops themselves. Of course, as with any job there are incompetant cops but I definately don't think they all are, or many of them. I had wanted to be one, for a long time, though I don't like the idea of being a bobby but I think i'd love to be a detective doing the more difficult cases.
But the job is just so poorly managed. Saw the policing getting worse in Ealing yearly, with so many people I knew getting mugged in crime hotspots with a constantly shrinking number of police working in the area. Increased paperwork, decreased manpower and utterly terrible system in place for once people are caught. It doesn't matter how good the police are if the "system" keeps chucking them out without adequate punishment. Due to the ridiculous legal system more criminals are on the streets than there should be, and that leads to less fear of being locked up, which again bumps the numbers of criminals.
The idea really is to have enough patrols working that any patrol car should be able to get to any incident that needs a immediate response within 5-10mins, maybe 1-2 minutes, you can still get lucky and phone the police while they are driving down the road, but if they aren't you're screwed.
You can see its getting worse, anyone can, the idea of hiring massive numbers of ridiculously under qualified and underpowered "half cops" instead of getting more real policemen out there is only making everything worse.
Good people often, trying to do a worthy job, being destroyed by inept government/management.
Glad you had a good outcome though, I think one burglary we had a great response, but another one(years and years apart) and a few things with neighbours being robbed, and other things the response was beyond a joke.