They are incompetent
Cops only know how to beat people, do drugs, charge people with crimes and lie
Every true crime show coverage Rommel-ises figures like Ted Bundy to the point that they erase how incompetent the pigs were. They paint them as being suave, super-genius criminal masterminds rather than creeps and opportunists who take advantage of the many opportunities that the Chief Wiggum-esque cops hand to them on a platter.
I don't remember the details exactly but I think Bundy was apprehended and maybe cuffed and left in the second floor of a library unattended. Bruh. So he jumps out the window and runs away since the windows weren't secure and neither was the building. Couldn't have seen that coming!
From memory Bundy made it through at least one traffic stop and it was basically a matter of "His car fit the description and he matched the profile of who we were looking for but he seemed like a nice, modern gentleman who was polite and friendly so I waved him on. Alas, he got away without even an attempt at a disguise because he was just so incredibly smart that he somehow outwitted us all!"
I think it was him who was also put in some county jail cell or similar. The cell had those floating roof tiles like an in office building. So he pushed them up and tried to escape that way too. I don't know if he did or not but that's not some criminal mastermind at work, that's just incompetence handing the guy a free throw.
Likewise they need to tell us that John Wayne Gacy is some genius criminal mastermind because otherwise they might have to talk about his connections to the Delta Project and North Fox Island.
I think it's useful for people to recognise the cops as being incompetent but that's only the first step and it's only a half measure. Those fuckers are extremely good at covering up for Epstein and they are perfectly competent when it comes to assassinating Fred Hampton and stuff like the MOVE bombing; it's not about whether they are incompetent or not, it's about where they are competent and where they choose strategic incompetence that reveals their true nature, in the same way that capitalism is both ruthlessly efficient and hopelessly ineffective depending on what it's doing and it's only by looking at this holistically that it reveals the reality of how capitalism truly functions.
Hell with Ted Bundy, one of his victims escaped and was found wandering (description of violence)
spoiler
naked, clearly in distress, with a visible and bleeding hole drilled in his head
When concerned neighbours called the cops and they arrived, they got there just about when Bundy did, and the cops assumed the two were a gay couple and didn't want to get involved
The sheer incompetence of the cops in that case is astounding
This also applies to even the old serial killers. People commonly say that Jack the Ripper was probably nobility, so obviously, he could get away with it, it's just classism, not police incompetence. However, there is one letter to the police believed to actually be from the man himself, the 'From Hell' letter, and it's so full of misspellings, and the exact way words are misspelled, it suggests that he was actually barely literate and not very well-educated, so probably not nobility.
Unless that was simply a clever ploy to further disguise the true character of the ripper
Maybe it's just me, but I don't want the cops breaking into my house to investigate the smell of my dinner. Curry is delicious, and you know how pigs are about food. We've already (mostly) gotten rid of scent being a reason to search with the ingresses we've made for weed. Let's avoid odor being a definitive reason to search people's property again.
There's a difference between the smell of weed and the fetid rot of decaying bodies
not like I want cops just barging in places over spurious reasons... but if I'm smelling rotting flesh next door I would like that looked into imo
