American History Reveals the Alternative to the Police State

Robert E. Wright

Americans could reform their police departments in many ways to make them less brutal but some protesters go further and seek to dismantle them entirely. Cynics might see such a move as a ploy to spend taxes on local income redistribution programs while drawing policing resources from state and federal police agencies. After all, nobody is going to finance businesses that cannot obtain adequate insurance coverage due to a dearth of local law and order infrastructure.
Eliminating the police entirely certainly would stop police brutality but many people fear that even more violent alternatives would arise to fill the resulting void. They imagine violent anarchy, mob rule, or rule by the Mob, i.e., organized crime syndicates like the Mafia or Mexican drug cartels. Something like that could result, but with a proper transition we could also end up with a more peaceful, prosperous society without a police presence.
I speak not of some utopian scheme but of history, American history. America’s first police force, in the modern sense, formed in Boston in 1838, over half a century after the Declaration of Independence, but it wasn’t until the 1880s, a century after independence from British tyranny, that all major U.S. cities operated police departments. Businesses eager to lay the cost of protecting their property onto all taxpayers, not public disdain for criminal activity, were the prime movers of the change...
...So how did early Americans prosper without the putative protection of a police state?
For starters, many armed themselves, as was their right under the original understanding of the Second Amendment, various state constitutional clauses, and natural rights doctrine. Each adult understood they had to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their own property. Not everyone armed themselves with gun or blade, especially in urban settings where crowds provided adequate personal defense in daylight in most neighborhoods. Older gentlemen with something to lose, however, often carried ingenious contraptions like cane swords and guns, just in case.
In rural areas, you were lacking if you weren’t packing because you never knew when a desperate predator, of the human or furry variety, might try to steal your stuff or take your life. For those too young to remember, Michael Bellesiles’s claim that early Americans didn’t own many functioning firearms was the original fake news. Turns out that most early Americans were armed, to protect themselves and others when called to do so via militia or posse duty...

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