Hello, I was very happy with our short exchange, however I was disappointed with my reliance on conjecture and complete and total lack of information on the issue of police abolition. As a result, I took some time to do a little reading on the issue.
Put simply, police abolition would probably need to be tested on a small scale with decent success before I could support it nationally.
1944 Denmark underwent the dismantling of the Danish police force by the Nazis, 4 years after the cowardly Nazi attack in 1940. This event was dubbed ‘7 months without police.’ Jorgen Trolle, the head of the Copenhagen state prosecutor's office recorded the outcomes of the event. He wrote of the unmistakable increase in crime, though this crime was more potent in certain types of crime. To start, there were merely 10 robberies throughout the entirety of 1939 in Copenhagen. However, this rose about 10 a month (120 a year) in 1943. This is an undeniable increase, but it is nothing compared to the remarkable increase to 100 per month following the destruction of the Copenhagen police.
This tenfold increase in Copenhagen was seen in burglary and larceny as well. Despite this, crimes where the perpetrator could be detected without the police like fraud and embezzlement there was no notable increase.
My source for this (which I will link in your PMs) states that the Danish experience was ‘imperfect and of short duration,’ however the author argues that ‘a modern industrial society can hardly be kept going without police and penal courts.’
A 2019 study looked into the impact of implementing a police force for the first time on crime across English counties. In other words, it looks at crime before and after a police system, the study ultimately concludes that there was a notable crime decrease following the implementation of police so long as the police force was ‘sufficiently large.’ Counties that only established a small police force did not see much change. More specifically, the implementation of sufficiently large police forces decreased rural crime by 19% and decreased London robberies by 40-46%. These decreasing effects persisted for violent and property crime. In contrast, there was no notable decrease in homicides following the creation of sufficiently large police forces. However, it is important to note that ‘sufficiently large’ was defined as 1 officer per 1500 citizens, but this is very low by today's standards. For instance, America has 3.9-4.5 per 1500 citizens, England today has 3.2, and Germany has 4.5. So, it could be argued that we have jumped the gun on police forces, making them too big and suffering for it.
I will link you my sources in your PMs at your request.