For most of the history of the world, there was no such thing as an organized police force. For the most part, we got along fine.
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Sorry, I missed this one the first time around until it got quoted.
To the best of my knowledge, after disease and periodic bouts of famine, death at the hands of other humans has been a leading cause of death over MOST of human history. This being true until perhaps the last 100-200 years in the West and up until the present in much of the poorer nations of the world.
Certainly this high killing rate has proven true in most surviving or until-recently surviving hunter/garthering and subsistence agriculture societies, even those which appeared outwardly peaceful. If disease or famine didn't carry you off, all it took was one violent altercation over the course of a lifetime to become a murder statistic, which in areas of low population density may amount to only one killing every few years.
Likewise, most of our own Western history has been replete with accounts of footpads, vagabonds, blackguards, robbers and highwaymen of various sorts accosting the lonely traveller. Look up the history of the Natchez Trace on our own frontier for examples of folks getting along "just fine" without law enforcement.
Even given a historical elcted Sherriff and Citizen Posse under ideal conditions, I believe history shows that such bodies OFTEN committed acts that would be considered entirely illegal today. Sure they didn't kick down Granny Smith's door, but they might lynch a stranger on suspicion, and tolerate plainly immoral/illegal activities if enough of the community derived income from such (to quote a classic country song: "strangers don't come down off Rockytop, reckon they never will").
It is irrelevant to take the example of crime rates in rural societies as a model for the whole. Crime rates in rural societies in MOST places are low (even in Africa, I was there),
Even in rural societies in the absence of an organized legal system enforced by some policing body, it became necessary everywhere for armed groups of neighbors to periodically take up weapons and hunt down miscreants, as was done so often in our own American history. Our modern term for this is vigilante justice and we find it wanting.
I think folks forget just how many centuries it took to formulate modern Western legal systems, we really do stand on the shoulders of many giants, large and small.
Perhaps Crossatjoe did indeed enjoy an idyllic rural existence, but there WAS a police force, maybe not within 30 minutes response time but they were there, had been for years, and did react to evildoers. If one of Crossatjoe's neighbors had knocked him off or stolen his car, that person would have had real reason to fear eventual apprehension by said police.
I do not live in an idyllic rural area, I live in a middle-to-lower-income urban setting. Actually, in the absence of police I don't believe there would be TOTAL chaos. People are less inclined to commit crimes upon people they know, and most of humans everywhere are not actually violent psychopaths. We would do what people have always done, trust and band together with the people we know and be suspicious of strangers. Eventually control would probably devolve into the hands of the powerful, resulting in the sort of actual or de-facto feudalism that has prevailed in most human societies throughout history and still does in many Third World Nations.
I share Muleskinner's skepticism of the inherent superiority of locally elected law enforcement officials, one only has to look at the past history of MANY areas (not just Texas <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> ) in the USA.
I figure what has been MOST effective in raising the standards of law enforcement of all sorts has been an increasingly educated populace, an increasingly powerful free press, and above all improved means for the communication and disemination of information. Like the internet for example.
Birdwatcher
