[drekk]

Our modern system of policing traces its roots to slave patrols and is a few hundred years old, at most. For the overwhelming majority of human history it was an ad-hoc community organization more akin to a watch. We get police from the Greek polis (city or polity) by way of the Latin politia (citizenship). The US idea of a civil force salaried and charged with deterring crime is something we inherited from England with the idea of "keeping the king's peace". We have slave patrols to thank for marrying the watch to the militia. [0]

Your last sentence ignores the possibility that the LAPD, a department downright infamous for its police gangs, could be a contributing or even causative factor for LA crime being, as you put it, "out of control".

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...

[smcl]

Minor nitpick, the agency infamous for gangs is the LASD which is separate. The LAPD is infamous in other ways though, Rodney King is going to stick in many people's minds for a long time, and there's an enormous "Corruption and misconduct" section in their wikipedia page that is full of some really awful stuff.