No, it expressly is not the role of American cops to protect people.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/do-the-police-have-an-obligation-to-protect-you/

In the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police have a general “public duty,” but that “no specific legal duty exists” unless there is a special relationship between an officer and an individual, such as a person in custody.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect. In its 1989 decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the justices ruled that a social services department had no duty to protect a young boy from his abusive father. In 2005’sCastle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the police for failing to protect her from her husband after he violated a restraining order and abducted and killed their three children. Justices said the police had no such duty.

It is only their job to ‘enforce the law’, which they are abysmally bad at.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-primarily-crime-fighters-according-data-2022-11-02/

In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.

Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example.

In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review, of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.”

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/08/20/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes/

In reality, about 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction. Therefore, the number of people police hold accountable for crimes – what I call the “criminal accountability” rate – is very low.

Police are agents of the state who are vested with the ‘legitimate’ monopoly on use of violent force within a state.

In a state that is overwhelming controlled by the wealthy, this means their primary function is to ensure the property rights of wealthy people.

Everything else they do is secondary or ancillary to that.

Police do not ‘reduce crime’.

Police have zero obligation to protect anyone.

What actually reduces crime? Actually protects people?

Lifting them out of poverty.