So what is your suggestion, just let bad situations happen to you? Regardless of if the police actually do anything, it's important to have a paper trail of things so that you point to them if you ever have to end up in court.
True if further actions can be taken. When my house was burglarized the police came and investigated and shrugged their shoulders, but their police report was instrumental in filing an insurance claim.
I do, and this is an appropriate situation to call them about, regardless of your race. There are problems with the police, to be sure, but this is not a situation where someone is getting beaten up (or worse) over a traffic stop or misidentification during the commission of a crime.
Cops have been known to push stalking, domestic violence, rape and similar cases under the carpet or, even worse, abuse the contact information from the criminal complaint to stalk the victims themselves (see [1], [2] or whatever turns up at Google for "police officers stalking women"). Not to mention the organized denials of service that regularly crop up as "backlog of rape kits discovered" headlines.
Women have all kinds of valid reasons to stay as far away from cops as they can, women of color, queer/nb/trans women even more.
Some PDs have changed procedures and established special, often female-led, teams to deal with cases involving such sensitive scenarios... but they're not many to begin with.
Is this the rule or the exception? No doubt there are reported failures, but is that the average experience for a reporter (even accounting for race, gender, etc.) of a stalking or other similar personal security concern? Stories such as these are useful for motivating the public and our government to fix the problems, but they have a side effect of discouraging people from taking useful action where it would not be harmful.
We should be giving our most helpful advice here; let’s not make people panic unnecessarily.
The fact of the matter is that Apple will only provide the identities of AirTags owners to law enforcement officers in the course of legitimate investigation work; in the interest of privacy, they won’t give them out to just anyone who asks. So if you want to get help, getting LE assistance is practically the only way to go.
> but is that the average experience for the typical reporter of a stalking or other similar personal security concern?
In Germany, it is estimated that 300.000 (!) stalking cases happen each year, not even 20.000 get reported to the police - and only 1 % of these (!!!) ends up in a conviction.
Unfortunately, as with all attempts at estimating why crimes are not reported, data is scarce - the general consensus seems to be a mistrust in police and the court system (either that the case gets ignored, that proof is insufficient or that personal data ends up at the offender - I personally was exposed by incompetent cops at court after filing a criminal complaint for racism against a local Nazi, fwiw), and a fear of attackers escalating their behavior.
