You don’t need to trust either of them. The tor browser is open source and verifiable, and the network is distributed and open. All you have to do it follow the rules and take care of how you approach your browsing habits.
The police can still ‘get you’ if they target you personally and you slip up, but that’s about it really.
Waxing lyrical about VPNs is folly whilst dismissing Tor when the very nature of any VPN is centralised. There are an abundance of extremely shady VPN companies, and very few trustworthy ones, I only have one which I fully trust, and even that relies on my trusting what they say about logging!
Tor doesn’t have that limitation, being a decentralised network means trust is irrelevant and trust of the browser is verifiable.