Having had the pleasure of spending some time deep enough into the wilderness(central Brazil to be exact) that it takes a couple of days for law enforcement get on the scene, they are only required in the most extreme cases which is much rarer than you would think. This was mostly possible by way of something know as local justice(probs not correct translation), or jungle justice, basically if you are a thief and get caught you will most likely get a bullet fired into you hand, not only to scare the crap out of you but to let other kind folks know that you have been punished, do something worse or get caught doing the same over and over and it is likely you will be forced to dig your own resting place, this kind of system very quickly weeds out the men from the boys, this may seem like it would toughen the criminals but believe me it has the opposite effect. When in the little village for the second time i hired a brand new car(the road to the village was 15km on a dirt road away) and all the time i was there we left not brand new but very expensive electronics lying around. My friend left his ipad in a bakery and we came home by car and did not realise till after we went back the next day and someone had returned it, I can tell you after living in good and bad parts of the UK that this is most unlikely to happen.
I did not have any trouble with the police out there but my friend did as he was out there for a year and the only problems he had was that the local(town not village) took his bike from him as he was not licensed, they did not charge him with anything just strait up took his property under the threat of being shot.
I also heard stories of the police over stepping the mark and feeling the bite of this kind of justice but never witnessed it.
Sometimes we are told that we can't do without this or that but in my experience and my experience only, this more often than not turns out to not be the case.
Funnily enough in the cities in Brazil that i did spend some time in(Sao Paulo and Rio) i did feel scared and threatened, mostly by the local mallitia wearing police uniforms and some times by the criminal underclass that those environments attract.
If you need an outside authority to let you feel safe then that is how you feel, i am not knocking you for it at all, i used to think this also but i have had enough experiences at home and abroad at least allow me to question why i needed it.
Meanwhile in this country I have been the victim of some pretty brutal violence from those claiming to have an authority over me, much more so as a youngster but I still see the UK police as Britains most well organised, well funded and most criminal gang, this is not just a suspicion as i have the physical and mental scars to prove it and also all the paperwork to back it up, I have been compensated a lot for it but I also have never had an admission of guilt. This just my own perspective.
I have spent time in Ecuador in cities similar to what you are describing, without the presence of any police force (or other agents of the government). I came away thinking exactly as you did. Really low crime and when it does happen, the locals take care of it.
The idea that we need governmental agents, to keep us safe, is because we are conditioned to think humans, as a whole, are not moral and society would fall into a violent mayhem without the government's rules-- and it's agents to enforce them, of course. It's far from the truth though, in my experience.
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