Police forces have been around for a few centuries in Europe and we must assume that there was a certain amount of concern for what we might nowadays refer to as community safety when Governments decided to set them up in the 1700’s and 1800’s.
In the USA, in contrast, there were vast areas of the country (the so-called Wild West) where order was preserved and justice was meted out, over many decades in the 19th century, by self-styled vigilante type groups – but these eventually were replaced by establishment of official state police. (The National Rifle Association is a kind of legacy of this era).
While the stated purpose of the police was to protect ordinary citizens, (and, I suppose, particularly the new middle class citizens), from criminals, they also served a vital purpose in upholding the pyramid of injustice and unfairness atop which sat royal families, the nobilities, and the wealthy of the time.
We remember that in Ireland, in the 1840’s, the police force of the day – the Royal Irish Constabulary – had an important role in implementing the economic policies of the ruling merchant classes supported by the British Government in Westminster which were partly (and many would say, more than partly) responsible for the widespread starvation among poor people in Ireland at that time.
So the establishment of police forces ensured that the great, the wealthy and the privileged were protected within the borders of their own countries. The newly educated middle classes (who may have harboured opinions that society perpetuated unfairness and injustice) were controlled by making them fearful that somehow their slight and hard won advantages in society would be done away with if they did more than simply complain about their lot.
After all, they saw the way the police treated the poorer working classes if they went out on the streets protesting and got a bit stroppy.
Many protests in the 19th Century in Europe and in that new bastion of freedom, the USA, were brutally put down with loss of life by the police.
Some middle class people may have been sympathetic with the struggles of very poor workers in spirit, but tut-tutted in public at their lack of patience, or lack of forbearance, or lack of acceptance of their lot in life and/or how the world works.
(And things hadn’t changed that much really in the late 20th century. Closer to home, we saw the reaction of police to the miner’s strikes in England in the late 1980’s, and the actions of the so-called heavy gang in Ireland in the 1970’s when quick results were demanded by the political establishments in those times).