I hate the "talk about emergencies" section of Duolingo because its so copaganda heavy.
Also this should be right because in English police refers to multiple cops. Otherwise you say "police officer" or "cop" for singular. "Beschermen" should be the plural verb. 
I dislike that inconsistency.
explanation
@domo In Dutch, "politie" refers to the institution rather than being the plural of cop. It's an uncountable noun of sorts, and therefore uses singular forms of verbs.
explanation
@joepie91 but do you have a word for "cop"? 
Like how do you say multiple cops in Nederlands? Do you have to say "police officiers" (politieagenten)?
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@domo A singular cop would be a "politieagent" (or, colloquially and more commonly, "agent", as that word is rarely used for anything else anyway), and so the plural would be "politieagenten" or "agenten".
language stuff
@domo I'm surprised you didn't mention the d/t thing as the problem, as that's the one that trips up even most Dutch people for their entire lives 🙂
There are some other 'fun' ones, like the two different articles: eg. "de krat" vs. "het krat" which are both correct, but for most words, only one of the two is correct!
I'm curious what specific issue you have with the past tense? I'm a native Dutch speaker, so possibly there's something there that I never noticed.
(Aside, the water thing would be "geen water", rather than "green water" :p)
re: language stuff
(Aside, the water thing would be "geen water", rather than "green water" :p)
That was the fault of me switching to heliboard as my main android phone keyboard earlier this week and poorly switching between the dutch keyboard and english keyboard 🤦 I used to rely heavily on swype (gesture typing) on my phone, and switching back to non-gesture typing has been hell on my dyslexia. Also heliboard doesn't have an easy swype spacebar to switch languages like the samsung keyboard did.
I am now at a laptop keyboard, where I can type better and respond more thoroughly :3
I'm surprised you didn't mention the d/t thing as the problem, as that's the one that trips up even most Dutch people for their entire lives 🙂
Oh that's what I meant by the "past tense" issues! I find it confusing on how to say I did something. For instance, without looking it up, I'm going to guess that to say "I walked", I'd say "Ik heb geloopt" and I am generally confused on if I should say "ik ben geloopt" vs "ik heb...". I'm also confused on the t/d, but my dutch tutor I had for a couple of months when I first came to NL in 2020 told me about fokschaap? That's supposed to be a mnemonic device of some sort, but I can't remember it. Wait, is it to say that if it ends in a an f, k, or p, you use a t, versus if it ends in any other consonant it's a d?
I think the other one was from the youtube channel "Dutchies To Be" where she says "sexy soft ketchup", but I'll be real, I don't remember how that's supposed to help me either 🫣
There are some other 'fun' ones, like the two different articles: eg. "de krat" vs. "het krat" which are both correct, but for most words, only one of the two is correct!
Wait, I didn't know that any nouns had two possible articles outside of making things plural, where it's always de. I have had the hardest times with remembering de/het, and the only thing that's helped there has just been repetition. In english, our most confusing articles are "a" and "an" but those have a trick of "if it begins with a vowel, use an, for everything else, use a", thus "an ocotopus", "a cat".
re: dutch language stuff
@joepie91 I found the soft sexy ketchup video!
explanation
@joepie91 uncountable nouns has always felt weird to me. The first one that was explained to me was water, but... You can can measure water and my brain won't drop that. I know its "ik heb geen water" and I know in English we would say "I have no water" and that makes less sense, but it still feels confusing.
Still, its not the most confusing thing in Dutch. I still think the most confusing is past tense conjugations and maybe sentence ordering when the sentence becomes complex?
(BTW, not defending English. English is awful! Curse it being my first language!)