I ride a 300 € bike as a hobby in summer. It’s from 2014. Given the highly advanced bike stealing culture present locally, any more expensive bike would need to be smeared with gull excretions for protection against theft. :P

Your post makes it look like a binary choice between cop-filled reality and cop-free fantasy. But there are marked differences between how many cops (many = often more stupid, untrained, poorly selected, corrupt) a society needs and what activity is expected of them.

Existing societies also demonstrate a vastly different need for imprisoning people.

Myself, I think that prisoners per capita is a better indicator than cops per capita. The latter gives weird results heavily tilted towards microstates (lead by Vatican, Pitcairn Islands and Motserrat).

• Maximum of prisoners per capita: North Korea (undisclosed but estimated), El Salvador (1600 per 100K), Cuba (794), Rwanda (637), Turkmenistan (576), United States (541).
• Minimum of prisoners per capita: go and have a look, it’s interesting. The leading 5 have a trend towards microstates and very poor developing countries, but if one filters them out and chooses sizable countries with functioning economies, the first that comes across is Japan - with an incarceration rate of 33 per 100K. That’s 48 times less than El Salvador and 16 times less than the United States. The first European country on the list is Finland with 52 per 100K, indicating approximately what a “western style” society can achieve. The EU average seems to be around 100 per 100K. The highest rated EU country seems to be Poland with 194 per 100K.

Notably, the first somewhat sizable European country and western-type society on both lists is Finland. It has the lowest prisoners per capita in Europe (at 52 per 100K) and the lowest cops per capita in Europe at 132 per 100K. It is not a known haven of rampant crime - it has really low crime rates too. Apparently in some conditions, you can have few cops, few prisoners and limited crime.

My guess - I could be wrong - is that the quality and coverage of social security, education and health care are what actually make the difference. Most people don’t start criminal activity for fun. Contributing factors include desperate poverty, poor parenting, lacking education, mental illness and exposure to trauma, damage from disease and substance abuse, etc, etc. Lots of full prisons are probably a factor that contributes to criminality, by making a “higher education in crime” accessible to more people.

As a minimum, how about frequent rotation and a sortition + selection system to staff the squads?

Imaginary example:

Two “cops” are needed for a term of 90 days (side note: in this hypothetical society, it could be that a cop is not a first responder but an investigator - first responders may be selected by proximity to the event and called up using some automated emergency messaging system). An investigator is allowed to request expert assistance from outside their department and often does.

At first, 10 candidates are sortitioned at random. Out of them, 3 refuse the job for various reasons, 7 go through instruction and pass evaluation. Out of them, 3 either step out during training or fail exams, 4 complete exams. Among them, another round of sortition occurs: 2 are selected at random, while 2 are paid compensation for study and assigned to reserve. If lottery chooses them again, they won’t need to pass exams.

This might be possible to enhance with other tricks. If feedback shows that cops cannot be impartial near their home, then they don’t work near their home. If however, feedback shows that they perform best near their home, then the opposite way.

The main goals this would aim to achieve:

• ensure that corruption will not start
• ensure that investigation is not biased (or that chances exist of bias being quickly exposed)
• ensure that offices cannot be given by people in power to whom they prefer
• ensure that competence is valued and unqualified bozos won’t be appointed