Just remember:<p>Professional police, as a concept, had to be shoehorned into the Western legal system. It's not the default mode. It was introduced in this form as a way to subsidize the capture of fugitive slaves, because slavery was simply not profitable without violent help from the state.<p>And before you point to things like the London Metropolitan Police Service to suggest that professional police were a natural and widespread evolution, common to common-law democracies, remember that Robert Peel, partly in response to criticisms that professional police weren't fit for a slavery-free society, wrote the patrolman's instructions in part because he was concerned about the slave-patrol-into-police lineage.<p>This USA traditionally had elected Sheriffs, who served the courts rather than the prosecution, and who had no extra powers or arms granted them (in other words, they were tasked with catching fugitives by court order, although everyone can participate in that activity at their choosing).<p>Especially now, in the information age, when everyone can gather high-quality evidence using the tools in their pocket, and call for community help at a moment's notice, the benefits to continuing this experiment of having slave patrols in our communities are very near zero.<p>Let's get serious about the next stage in our society - one that is free from police, and which thus allows the many good people who become police officers because they want to help others to actually do that, free from obligations to maintain an unjust world order.