To row back a bit: Hakozume is somewhat sectionalized into three parts: the introduction, the middle, and the anime. All parts share some distinction thou. The general episode length is halved to around 11 minutes and they mostly encapsulate the protagonist Police Box Women Kawai and Fuji in their work.
And the introduction part in a good step in into their world and their personalities. But the show uses all its positive traits here.
The middle section is a big let down in terms of characterization. This is highly likely due to the fact that the setting and premise changes drastically. Instead of just doing police box work, which mostly was minor work, they almost always end up in the Criminal Affairs station and with their characters in one way or the other. Sadly, it only shows to me that the original premise wasn't really enough to stay interesting. This is also partly due to the fact that aside the main pair, no other characters from their police box is introduced, ever. This middle part also is the one which feels the most random and episodes tend to vary wildly in their contents.
The anime part (which in this case I would argue are the last 4 episodes) is where the renaissance of the show happens. And the starting flag for this is obviously the car traffic accident episode. It is a hard shift in tone in contrast to all episode before. And I commend it for finding itself in the dark abyss which is the police life. Such episodes are also good vehicles to contrast veterans and rookies. The earlier episodes did this as well, and the middle suffered from a tag-along syndrome where the rookie was thrown into problems our of her capacity with all veterans around her which mostly solved everything for her.
The last 3 episodes form the core of the anime part. In this section the show tries to forgo its 11 minute episode runtime as these form a coherent story. But they feels extra weird when the (22-minute) episode starts a review of what happened in the last (11-minute) episode which literally happened 1 minute ago. Nonetheless, the arc structure is highly beneficial for this kind of show which emulates a comedy/slice of life/sitcom as their drama can have more time to breath and build longer terms of suspension.
There isn't really much to talk about Hakozume in general. The starting story structure works in the small setting, hampers its growth in the middle part and abandon it completely by the end. Thus it is hard to see how a potential second season would play out. I could read the manga for it but the setting and the characters aren't that strongly developed to be this engaging. On that note, the adaptation seems to be extremely faithful to its origin in its content. The designs are somewhat changed from what I have seen, but it fits the characters better in that sense.
For the most part the art and sound compliment the scenes but never take the attention.
In total, Hakozume suffers from its roots and wants to evolve into something different. But the early decisions and an ever expanding core cast limit the potential the roots had to begin with. If the author would redo this whole season it probably would be a complete different thing.
