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Society would fragment into smaller units that would have their own ways of addressing crime. Probably with something like the Taliban demanding tribute, adjudicating disputes, and lynching wrongdoers. For violent conflicts between these units, society would reinvent a slavery/genocide choice for the conquered such as you saw in the classical world. There'd be very little violent crime as we think of it, but a whole lot of war.
More likely, the government would fall to a coup and start policing violent crime again.
Asking what would happen to the crime rate in a state with no police is like asking what would happen to interest rates in an economy that abolished money. A state with no police is not enforcing a monopoly on violence, and so is not a state.
Yes yes but I zeroed in on violent crime for a reason.
Assume that people are still being cited for speeding, property thefts are still investigated, and police still exist as an entity, and the state thus does exist and is capable of engaging in police action.
But police are no longer tasked with intervening in or capturing violent offenders who might fight back.
Would we expect to see some massive and sustained increase? If so, this would reveal that money spent on policing IS in fact valuable for saving lives, since it holds back the 'wave' of violence that would otherwise surge forth and thus a lot more lives hang in the balance than a naive review might assume. So being overly concerned about policing violence is in fact 'rational.'
I find it an interesting question in large part because there are clearly pockets of the country that have virtually ZERO violent crime already, and I expect that they don't need policing to keep it that way. But others would see massive surges if there weren't some countervailing force reigning in the violence. Not sure how this would ultimately interact in a world where police didn't stop violent crime.
the low crime areas would arm themselves, build fences and hire security guards to keep the high crime people out.
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