Steven Pinker describes how that went:
> "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."[16]
Apart from violence, there's another big thing that probably went missing, too - authorization for certain people to enter private property for reasons of the general good. The reason we call the police for welfare checks, for better or worse, is that nobody else has the right to enter your house. A doctor might be better suited to responding to someone undergoing a mental health crisis, but they can't break in. Similarly, you see stories of "police rescue deer from rooftop" or whatever because nobody else is authorized to climb onto random rooftops. If a society wants to get rid of the police, it needs to designate some other group to handle this use case. It can't simply get rid of the police.
A "natural experiment" of a world without police is quite unnatural: it's a world built up around the police with a sudden police-shaped gap in the middle.
To pick an analogy that should make sense to folks here, it's like shutting down your datacenter for 16 hours, suffering serious outages, and then concluding that your company absolutely needs its datacenter. Well, yes, it does today, but that's not what the people saying you should look at public cloud are advocating.
That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of disagreement is really narrow on this issue.
We literally cannot remove the police without a collapse of the state and consequently the rest of our civilization, and if you think for even one moment about how that would play out it would be apparent: everything fractures into private armies with no incentive to uphold democratic rule of law; the most powerful private armies become de facto states and their ruler a law unto himself--effectively a king. Obviously modern society can't survive under these conditions--no one can trust rule of law which absolutely underpins our economy. So congratulations, you've rediscovered the dark ages and doomed hundreds of millions to deaths from violence, illness, and starvation. :)