Skyhigh,
3 hours per day is a pretty high utilisation rate for a helicopter in the UK. Over 1,000 hours per year is a lot more than many helicopters fly.
As an approximate guide, it takes almost as much time on the ground in pre-flight and post-flight activities by the crew, as it does to fly.
Think for a moment about the work that police helicopters do. Most of the valuable stuff is not planned but reacting to situations as they occur. The criminals, missing persons, lunatic drivers and others do not have to book the time they do their burglary, murder, suicide attempt, DIC or whatever, so that it can be scheduled into a pre-planned programme. (That would be nice - perhaps we can suggest to the politicians that they make a law to require this!). If such a reactive service flew much more than 3 or so hours per day, then there would be far too many occasions when 2 significant incidents occurred at the same time which would markedly affect the ability of one helicopter to respond adequately.
There are some police helicopters in the UK that fly closer to 1 hour per day. The most that any UK police helicopter flies in a year is about 1,500 hours per year. It would be very difficult to organise operations to fly more than that with one aircraft.