The holidays are a time for family, eggnog, and, if you live in a movie, absolutely abysmal police work. For decades, cinema has taught us a valuable lesson: if you are in danger between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, do not call the cops. They are either too busy, too incompetent, or too trigger-happy to be of any actual help. From leaving children alone to gunning down clergymen, the badge seems to lose all meaning once the tinsel goes up. In the spirit of the season, let’s review the rap sheet for the worst law enforcement performances in holiday movie history.

The negligence of the Chicago Police Department in this film is staggering. After Kate McCallister calls from Paris in a panic, they send a single squad car to the house. The officer knocks once, shrugs, and leaves. That’s it. Case closed. They don’t try to contact neighbors, they don’t come back later, and most egregiously, they don’t return to the scene after Kevin single-handedly apprehends two dangerous felons. They just leave an eight-year-old boy alone in a massive house that is practically a crime scene to clean up the mess himself. These officers didn’t just fail; they actively participated in child endangerment.

This seminal slasher film features police work that borders on accessory to murder. The cops spend most of the movie dismissing the sorority sisters’ fears about obscene phone calls until bodies start piling up. But their magnum opus of failure comes at the very end. After dispatching officers to the sorority house where Jess has just discovered the bodies of her friends and bludgeoned her boyfriend (whom she wrongly believes is the killer), the police simply… leave. They leave a traumatized, injured young woman alone in a house with two corpses and the actual killer still hiding in the attic. It is a breathtaking display of dereliction of duty.

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While Officer Al Powell is a national treasure, the rest of the law enforcement response at Nakatomi Plaza is a disaster class in crisis management. The FBI agents are glory-hounding morons whose playbook gets hostages killed, but the real villain with a badge is Deputy Chief Dwayne T. Robinson. He arrives on the scene, ignores all intel from the man inside the building, repeatedly tries to breach the tower (getting his own men shot), and actively antagonizes John McClane at every turn. He is more concerned with procedure and ego than saving lives, making him the Grinch of the LAPD.

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This one is the undisputed champion of holiday police brutality. The police are on a manhunt for Billy, a serial killer dressed as Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, they spot a man in a Santa suit walking toward a group of children outside a church. Instead of identifying the target or issuing a warning, the officer on the scene immediately opens fire, gunning the man down in cold blood in front of a group of orphans. The twist? It wasn’t Billy. It was Father O’Brien, a deaf priest trying to give the kids candy. The police literally murdered a clergyman on Christmas Eve because they couldn’t be bothered to confirm their target.

Small-town cops in horror movies are rarely Rhodes Scholars, but Sheriff Frank and Deputy Brent of Kingston Falls are aggressively useless. When a terrified Billy Peltzer runs into the station screaming that strange creatures are tearing up the town and killing people, they don’t just investigate; they openly mock him. They are smug, dismissive, and, as it turns out, drunk on the job. Their refusal to heed a citizen’s warning allows the Gremlin infestation to spiral out of control, leading to the destruction of the town and their own inevitable demise at the hands of the monsters they ignored.

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While the cops in Home Alone did too little, the police in this classic did way, way too much. Responding to the kidnapping of Clark’s boss, Frank Shirley, the police don’t attempt to negotiate or de-escalate. Instead, they send a full militarized SWAT team to crash through the Griswolds’ windows, destroy their living room, and hold the entire extended family—including the elderly Aunt Bethany and Uncle Lewis—at gunpoint. It is an absurd, excessive use of force that traumatizes a family just trying to have a nice Christmas dinner.

This entry is less life-or-death and more administrative incompetence, but it’s still maddening. When police respond to a call about a man on a roof, they find Scott Calvin inside the house, putting gifts under the tree. Instead of investigating whether he’s a hired entertainer or a confused dad, they arrest him for breaking and entering. They then interrogate the actual Santa Claus, ignore his magic, dismiss his story, and throw him in a holding cell on Christmas Eve. It’s proof positive that the legal system has absolutely no Christmas spirit and zero ability to process evidence that falls outside their narrow worldview.

What do you think? Did I miss a glaring example of holiday incompetence? Was the Sheriff in Jaws: The Revenge actually doing a great job despite the Christmas setting? Sound off in the comments below and let me know which movie cop deserves a lump of coal this year!