[red_admiral]

Great post, but I feel an aside on the England situation is in order. Prior to police forces, for anything too big for the Shire Reeves or Justices of the Peace to handle, the solution was "send in the army". This came to head at the Massacre of St Peter's Field (often called the "Peterloo Massacre", for example on its wiki page) where several hundred protesting workers were killed in a cavalry charge in 1819.

The massacre caused such public outrage that, among other things, London set up the Metropolitan Police (a.k.a. "the met") 10 years later. They were deliberately designed to be a non-militarised force: they wore visible uniforms, but they were black instead of the army's red; they carried truncheons instead of swords or firearms (this is also why most police in the UK to this day do not carry firearms); they were deliberately "civilian" not "paramilitary"; and they were "answerable to the public" in the words of Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (under whom the force was set up). The preventative instead of reactionary nature of policing definitely fits into this context too.