Question

If a police force was removed from society would crime increase, decrease or stay the same?

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Policing in the United States:

"In 1845, New York City became the first city outside the British Empire to adopt a police force based on the London model. With a long-established antipathy for uniforms, the original officers objected to wearing special costumes. Worried that the uniforms infringed on traditional American freedoms, opponents feared the dangers of a standing army. So a compromise was reached in which New York City police officers wore eight-point star-shaped copper badges over their left breasts instead of a complete uniform—hence their identification as the “star police,” “coppers,” or just plain “cops..."

"...Perhaps the greatest development in federal law enforcement, the creation of the U.S. Secret Service in 1865, was a last-gasp attempt to counter the longstanding counterfeiting problem. During the service’s first year of operation, field offices were set up in eleven cities and were credited with establishing a measure of monetary stability in the decade following the war. However, not until after two more presidential assassinations after Lincoln’s (Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901) did the Secret Service become officially responsible for protecting the president..."

"...Beginning in the 1970s, research in several cities demonstrated that increasing the number of police officers on random patrol or increasing the speed of their response had little effect on crime reduction. Since the inception of the London bobbies in the 1820s, routine police patrol had been considered a hallmark of modern preventive policing. The notion that crime could be prevented or at least suppressed by a highly regular and visible police presence was a long-held belief. Beginning in 1972, a one-year study was conducted in Kansas City to test this conviction. The controversial Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment report of 1974 found that police patrols, whether stepped up or diminished, had no significant impact on crime...."

If you read this interesting piece about the evolution of the American police, you notice police forces were created in reaction to changes in society (which is normal enough I reckon. I don't think it would make sense to build a force for a crime not yet problematic) from immigration and urbanization to bootlegging to counterfeiting. As a new crime arose, the police grew in size.

Which brings us back to the question aforementioned. Of course, it's far more complex than just what the police can and can't do. In New York City, so violent for so long, crime fell under Mayor Giuliani. Law enforcement took credit for the clean up of NYC. However, as Malcolm Gladwell argued in The Tipping Point and in the essay Power of Context of Bernard Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime, perhaps other forces were (and are) at work.


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As for Canada, it all began with the North-West Mounted Police (who later became the RCMP) who were charged to make sure the west was settled peacefully. Of course, one of its most famous officers was a soldier named Sam Steele - the man who brought peace and order in the north during the Klondike gold rush.

These days, Canadian police forces are facing the same issues and scrutiny its American counterparts are.