I’m not an expert on any of this. Just a caveat, I’m sure anything I propose will have it’s share of flaws.
State law enforcement (men armed with guns apprehending private citizens) should be the LAST step. For in-the-moment intervention, cops are already useless - unless they happen to be on site already, whatever violence happen, will happen before they get there. There’s no good answer to stopping a determined violent individual, short of empowering people to defend themselves and others around them.
I think there’s always going to be some level of violent crime. Some people simply don’t function the same way. For these people, we clearly need some kind of active response force. It’s use should be limited, based on hard fact and actual threat to civilian life. We also clearly need some kind of (humane) separation for people who cannot or will not rehabilitate, people who cannot be reintegrated into our society. These are two of the only acceptable uses of state violence, in my opinion.
I don’t know the exact way it would look, but I’d like to see a move towards communities looking after themselves and those around them, in all aspects, and this includes safety and security.
Unfortunately, for property crimes, the only way to actually enforce property ownership is through violence, either direct threat of violence (break my shit and I’ll end you), or state violence (break my shit and the state will send armed men to apprehend you unless you reimburse me). We have to determine what level of property security versus violence we seem acceptable. I tend to fall a bit more extreme towards violence not being okay to protect property - I don’t think there’s a single piece of property worth killing or maiming an individual over. Thus, if the only way to protect property is this level of violence, I believe it is wrong to intervene. I don’t believe it is right for the individual to intervene, and I don’t believe it is right for the state to intervene. The sad truth is that most of what the police force does now is enforce these types of crimes.
I dunno, have you seen the drivers out there? Pretty sure some of them are watching movies.