Personally, I think cops are a thing that exists in the world as part of the system, like soldiers or office workers of anyone else. As some people have said in the thread, it's less about having characters who are cops, and more about how you frame the concept of police in your narrative. Like do you portray them as heroic figures whose decisions the narrative supports and who are the "thin blue line" between civilisation and chaos? Or is your depiction that they are the brutal fist of fascism, enforcing colonialist brutality unfairly against marginalised people? Or do you focus on the cops from an inside perspective? Only human, making mistakes and falling prey to biases and the inherent unfairness of the system they're part of? It's less about having cops or even how your cops behave, and more how your narrative frames those actions, or handles questions of authority, who deserves it and how it can be abused.
On a fundamental level, my comic is about cops. Like, they're called "Knights", but they are people who are authorised by a figure who has been given a position of political power (for a really terrible reason: having a magic sword that gives him super powers) to carry around weapons and fight monsters in the street. They have licenses for those swords, other people aren't supposed to have swords in this setting.
While on paper knights are supposed to be these heroic people who only fight monsters and show no particular bias in who they protect, simply by the fact that they are flawed humans who exist in this structure where they are chosen by and answer to one guy and are meant to do as he says, and by having special powers which would make them extremely dangerous if they did turn against humans, they are actually a pretty scary concept. Also there's the fact that they effectively support the rule of a guy who has made the world unsafe by causing demon attacks. They might say "but I just happen to have superpowers and I'm using them to help people, I have no intention of being used as a looming threat against anyone who wants to oppose the king", but you might argue, it doesn't matter what they intend; merely by existing in that role, that's what they're doing. Plus the decisions on which places get knights protecting them is a way of exerting power (kind of like how government spending is used...) They're basically an authoritarian manufactured conflict or a protection racket. I deliberately have portrayed society as split on this issue. Showing both magazines and propaganda that talks about knights as these beloved heroes, and then graffiti and online discourse describing them as pigs and fascists.
One of the major themes of the story is "who deserves power?" and I want readers to wrestle with this one as much as the characters do, rather than unquestioningly supporting the easy "righteous guy with a gun will keep us safe from the bad guys with guns" narrative a lot of superhero stories go for. I wanted to ask the question here of, "can you actually be an ethical superhero?" and it's really an extension of the question of "can you be an ethical cop?" Is Rekki right, that if good people are cops and you get rid of the bad ones and there's a good person in charge that the system can work? Or is Sarin right that the entire system needs tearing down and something new building in its place with far less individual autonomy placed on enforcers and a greater focus on prevention rather than punishment? Well, we'll see how it works out, won't we?