I'm reading a book, Rebels Against the Future, about the Luddite movement (1812, England) and one thing that keeps making me pause is how there doesn't seem to be any police forces in the communities.
It sounds like there's some local magistrate who has the ability to deputize people, a local militia, and the military that can be used, but there aren't "cops."
How did that make people's lives different from ours?
Was it incredibly dangerous because there was no one to police the area? Was it better because people had to police each other instead of let the cops do it?
I realize "safer" is a subjective word, but I'm hoping it helps express the thing I'm wondering about and you can help me think about it better.
Two things to get out of the way first.
For starters take into consideration that we didn't have the concentrations of people that we see after the 19th century, and that Nation-State as a centralized and organized political institution, doesn't happen until the 17th century. And the modern concept of Police is relatively new (17th-18th Century), before that [at least in Western Europe] what you had was the representatives of the Crown, who would make sure that the law be applied, not so much as peace keepers.
So after the fall of Rome and up until the 19th century the norm was to have small communities, which meant that people was more accountable to each other than we are now. But what about laws, who would make people follow them? Well, remember that after the fall of the Roman State in the 5th century, is the Church the one that takes much of the functions of the State. One of these, was to tell the people what they could, and couldn't do, with the bonus that instead of going to jail, if you broke the "law" you were condemning yourself to hell.
How did that make people’s lives different from ours? Not much really. How many times do you need to see a cop in order not to break the law? Most people don’t break the law because of the Police, but because they have no reason, or motivation to do so. Most Anarchist and Libertarian philosophers argue on the same lines; you do not need a State with the monopoly on violence in order to keep society functioning. And most of Jude-Christianism relies on the same principle, you have the commandments, and you know the punishment if you break them.
Was it incredibly dangerous because there was no one to police the area? This is relative, because of what I mentioned above. Communities in general were smaller, and in smaller communities (even today) criminality is lower. If you read on the Middle Ages, the biggest dangers existed on the road, not on the villages or towns. Unless of course, they were raided, but that’s something different.
Was it better because people had to police each other instead of let the cops do it? This is not so much a historical question, but a sociological/philosophical/religious one. If you think that people are good in essence, then they didn’t need the police. If you think that people are bad in essence, then they had the Church and the representatives of the Crown to keep them in check. If you think that it is something in between, then they had both the Crown and the Church, and the good people keeping the village/town in check.