In the broadest possible interpretation, lots of things are social constructs, but I would imagine that any functional society would generally agree that murder, rape, assault, and theft should be discouraged.
My cynical point is that socially we tend to define “real crimes” in such a way to reinforce existing power hierarchies. Steal from the register and face prosecution, steal from your employee and maybe be forced to pay it back (maybe). Shoot your neighbor and get executed by the state, poison the river and face a civil case, starve foreign infants and face no consequences whatsoever. Morally all of these are awful things, but which ones get criminalized and prosecuted is extremely selective. The rich and powerful often not only get selective treatment when prosecuted, but the kind of violence that can bring is often not even criminalized at all.
My most horrifying example is the fact that until the 1990s it wasn’t legally possible for a man to be charged with raping his wife in some states. 13 states still treat marital rape as a lesser crime than rape of a non-spouse. I think we’d all agree that punishing rape is a good thing for the justice system to be doing, but that’s hardly sufficient when the law has such obvious holes in it.
In general, people are more likely to believe the word of a woman over the word of a man. So if a woman accuses a man of something, unless he can prove his innocence, he's got I would estimate a 3/4 chance of being found guilty of whatever the crime is. I think we need some way to rebalance that.
All laws and prosecutorial systems should be designed with misuse in mind, because misuse will happen. We should always think, "if I felt wronged by some person and wanted to get revenge, using the system as a weapon and being willing to lie, could I successfully use the system to get my revenge?" And I think in many cases in our current systems the answer is yes, misuse is very much possible. I won't even bother to describe any scenarios, because I'm sure we can all imagine them. Well, here's one [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDpvwWWzJuk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLowHT_ytBs
Other links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGE-3ioAlmQ
Most cops just let it slide while their "bad apple" colleagues do those thing. And are therefore complicit in perpetuating them. So you're still right about it being unreasonably generous to all cops, even if not all of them do that shit.
Lots of people have lots of opinions on what those things even are. Most of those opinions are utterly ridiculous.