@sylveon @matrix I think that, theoretically, a community being able to pool their resources together voluntarily to hire a private company to defend the community and enforce local laws, instead of relying on government police forces could work. That way, if there are instances of police brutality or abuse of power, the company can be held accountable - forced to fire and arrest those employees, or risk having their contract with the community terminated, resulting in the community hiring another company with a cleaner record. Theoretically, a small business is much more accountable to a community than the government is. On top of that, because their employees are just regular civilians, and not actual police, they lack any form of qualified immunity, would be no more militarized than any other civilian is allowed to be, and would, hopefully, cause them to feel less empowered and able to get away with abuses of power. It could potentially be an alternative solution to policing which would hopefully be more cost efficient and with abuse.
But, that's just theory. I doubt it would actually work as well in practice, and there are numerous flaws with the idea, most of which I'm sure you're already aware of and shouldn't really need to be stated. Most notably is that the poorer and generally higher crime communities which would need higher quality, more expensive police forces the most are also likely going to be the ones least likely to be able to afford them. So I'm saying it semi-ironically, in that I think that purely theoretically it could possibly work but also that I doubt it would be an effective solution in practice.