That's a great solution if it works. I was explaining this in another comment, but in my side of the world the police very rarely issue tickets for this type of stuff. And mostly when you call them they'll arrive in 30 min - 1 hour because it's "not a priority". Don't get me started on having something stolen (it never gets solved and they call you in a few months or years to retract your complaint because they can't solve it and it looks bad for them), or people being noisy at night or domestic violence complaints, where sometimes they'll ticket you for calling because you're "wasting their time" and "when they arrived there was no noise/sound of fighting/beating someone up". Like, of course dumbass. It happened 30 minutes ago. You think the lady spent 30 minutes arguing after the first punch? Of course they're quiet now.

And I'd understand their delay if they were actually busy with hard crime. But this is a small European country. We don't have guns. Out here a "gangster" will at most pull a knife on you, and then if they don't have another 3-4 guys with them they'll run with their tail between their legs if you pull a knife right back. This isn't a country of hardened criminals who grew up with the fear of bullets piercing the walls from gangs fighting on the block. Being police here is just being on a semi-vacation until 45, when you retire. They're doing fuck all, so when you ask them to actually do their job and not even prevent, but stop an ongoing crime - they would rather stop you from complaining instead.

Sorry, I went on a tangent there. TL;DR: my experience with police is that they're not helpful in these cases. I've learnt that the way you keep peace is by having superior firepower. Immediate physical violence or cost of fixing your vandalized asset are always better deterrents to being a prick than the potential outcome of maybe paying a few bucks, if some lazy assholes do their job, but probably walking away scot-free.