Any examples showing that’s possible? I don’t know of any society (aside from maybe some tiny islands) where you don’t have some police to maintain law and order.
It's a bit of a leap from eliminating "having a bunch of unaccountable armed dudes roaming around doing whatever they want without any oversight" to eliminating all police.
A few random ideas:
* fewer armed police, and being armed requires a higher level of experience/training/psych evaluation
* 100% public access to all police body cam footage.
* require police officers to maintain their own liability insurance, and have rates based on the a number of KPIs related to public safety and ethics
I'll note that while body cam footage and citizen recordings have helped bring visibility to police misconduct, in general they don't seem to have actually fixed anything. In some cases they increase unrest because now when a police officer is acquitted for doing something, people can look at the footage and get even more upset about it. Cops also frequently disable their cams and aren't punished for it.
Body cams might be an example of something that is good on paper but actually just distracts people from things that actually address a problem.
To be sure, what I'm suggesting would require a reworking of how those cameras are used and disclosed, and probably would require technical solutions in addition to policy ones. I'm definitely suggesting going far beyond the status quo in an attempt for transparency (pretty much "open sourcing" the camera footage)
Compared to the US, the NL seems to have far less cops. The cops are mostly just walking around or driving around.. they never pull you over, you just get a ticket in the mail. So there’s police, doing police things. But they never get involved in your day-to-day life unless you’re doing something obviously illegal. Granted, you can do a lot of things here that is illegal in the US, like prostitution, drugs, sit in the park with some beer and wine, pee in public, etc. Things are way more civil than the US was when I last visited a year ago.
A few random ideas:
* fewer armed police, and being armed requires a higher level of experience/training/psych evaluation
* 100% public access to all police body cam footage.
* require police officers to maintain their own liability insurance, and have rates based on the a number of KPIs related to public safety and ethics