In the rough tier of economic cost to implement higher/but more consistent/effective results, the breakdown of policing approaches is:
- Professional police force, fully staffed
- Partially professional police force for complex/difficult-to-solve cases, large amounts of monitoring, and/or violent criminals (use of deadly force), popular police on some sort of part-time basis
- All-popular police as part-time/on-call, but still using valid investigative procedures (e.g. sting operations, approved warrants), trial by jury and other fact-checking to avoid punishing innocents
- Popular police with minimal training, bringing whatever evidence to trial is gained, but no real investigative safeguards
- Popular police as judge, jury, executioner (the normally understood meaning of “vigilantism”) whether as a posse or as individuals
Note there is a parallel track for punishments: prisons may not be economically viable due to requirements for construction and full-time guards, even if the society can maintain a well-trained popular force or even some professional police. This document will touch on those.
Not all peoples have functioning government: in some, the police are corrupt; in others, they simply don’t exist/can’t be paid for. The question is what are the correct fail-downs in those situations.
Extended All Points Bulletin/APB: message everyone’s cell phones (vaguely similar to Amber/Silver alert in 48 states) and force them to leave their houses/place of business to look for suspect in a given radius. Since some places of business have many people in them, you only message a fraction of them, or designate a call center/dispatch point for that business and have security staff or other functionaries there perform the sweep.
Local Summons: the smaller analogue of extended APB. Normally an officer should call for backup when the situation gets serious, but there is no imminent harm to persons or very expensive property. Instead of reaching back to centralized dispatch, a short-radius (the cell tower would know) message can be sent to the local area to get people out of their houses to provide the backup.
Deputized Dash Cam/Body Cam: the expensive patrol functions partially can be replaced by citizens with the appropriate technology. When the citizen has captured the weaving drunk driver or otherwise illegal behavior on camera, they then move to neutralize/call for local citizen backup.
Popular Warrant/Summary Warrant: proper investigations can take quite a while. If prompted by the economic infeasibility of such, certain warrants (such as stings/wiretaps) would be granted summarily or as monitoring mechanisms, but with a limited frequency (not constant surveillance). Relative to performance of a professional police force, you would give up some of your capability against organized crime but maintain full capability against regular offenders.
Constrained Business Practices/24-7 Audits: Since there is no time to perform long-going investigations, you can curtail business organization and accounting flexibility, forcing posting of all payments and invoices to the Internet for constant monitoring. This helps with the less important paperwork check; the more important auditing function of verifying the disposition and use of equipment still requires humans. There are extensions to logistics trains such as modified packaging and packing, and forced location centralization of auditable items, in order to make them more easily verifiable.
Post-Facto Punishment Review: sometimes you will see active shooters killed or disabled by police or ordinary citizens. Sometimes they survive, however the insanity defenses or other red tape involved extends for months or years. This isn’t affordable in poor societies, so a brief investigation to find co-conspirators and facilitators should follow. Once that is complete, the offender should be summarily executed. The point here is that this is not just applicable to mass murderers. Rapists can be killed by their victims, scammers dealt with via their dupes. In order to prevent random crime sprees and retributions, such actions would be dealt with by post-facto punishment review: only if the punishment dealt clearly was excessive or unjustified, could the individual who assessed such punishment be punished in turn. Practically speaking, without real law enforcement or any systems of records, individuals have to get justice for themselves. You will see people getting away with crimes, but on balance the impunity will be greatly decreased from the alternatives. This approach is trying to mimic the sort of review that occurs in a professional police force following an officer shooting or similar possible misconduct.
Punishment Scale Adjustments: in a prosperous society, you have a wide variety of options to vary punishment according to the severity of the crime, including but not limited to labor/”community service”, house arrest, time in prison, confiscating goods/assessing debts, and so on. In a poor society, your scale of punishments compresses primarily to corporal punishment, slavery/long-term work assignment, and death penalty starting at lower thresholds than you otherwise would see. A representative adjusted scale would look something like:
- Robbery: X lashes or other physical torture scaled to the amount of money lost/debted. If compensation can be provided in a reasonable amount of time, the sentence could be commuted.
- Physical harm: eye for an eye.
- Death penalty: starting at single person’s economic lifetime output in that country (could be as low as $20K USD) or at crippling physical assault disabling productive economic work, or rape. Also any serious organized crime activity or clear association to organized crime.
- Slavery: for a term dictated by the crime, but on relatively good behavior. If the work is often refused or the offender commits other crimes, escalates to death penalty.