For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.
On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
> To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more positively residents evaluated the police services they got.
> "Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”
> But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area & more trust from people.
Likely a large portion of what they saw was a product of racial and political demographics. Whites are a larger percent of rural populations than cities. [0] White people on average rate police much better than non-whites. [1] Of course whites may rate police better because they live in rural areas, but the gap in satisfaction between whites and blacks is too great to be accounted for by more whites living in rural areas. Also rural people are more likely to be conservative and conservative people rate police much higher. Rural officers are in less danger in rural areas, so they may not need to be as alert and forceful because they know their lives are not in danger as much.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-... [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...