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Several different mental experiments are in order. Once upon a time, in the mid-19th through early 20th centuries, the front line of policing in major cities in the U.S. and northern Europe was the local constable on foot patrol. Beat cops were not highly trained. Nor were they well paid. But there were a lot of them, in enough numbers that an officer who needed assistance could blow his whistle and his fellow officers would come running. That means that several would be within earshot at any time; they probably met up regularly and chatted at the corners where their beats intersected. It was an honorable blue collar job, and guys who were good at it and showed initiative could move up, but a lot of them were just neighborhood guys who knew everybody, often got to know and mentor the kids who were spending too much time on the streets, and dispensed some informal street justice that kept minor matters out of court. There were some bad applies but most of them were ok. Then we professionalized the police, paid them a lot more, and put most of them in cars where they become an alien presence.

Private security guards are analogous to the old beat cops, without any formal police power. In large part, the private security industry emerged to fill the niche left when police officers retreated into the cars. The private security guards are tied to a specific employer, not the neighborhood, but I would imagine, depending on the layout of the area, that there can often be a real spillover effect due simply to having eyes on the street. Neighborhood watch patrols do the same thing, but private security guards work through the wee hours, long after the neighborhood volunteers have gone home.

I would be interested in an experiment in community policing that brought back elements of the old system. Having beat cops that frequently circle your block and who are within whistle call of each other translates into lots of bodies. That gets prohibitively expensive unless pay is very low. If pay is low, training standards, public expectations and legal liabilities must be adjusted accordingly. The whole system would have to shift gears. But in theory, a lot of shoeleather neighborhood cops on the street backed up by much smaller, more highly trained and highly mobile response teams might be worth exploring.

By the way, the same structural issue exists in medicine. We have made MDs the gatekeepers for far too much. As a practical matter, experienced nurses are informally practicing a lot of medicine in doctors offices and clinics, and as long as nobody gets sued (because something goes wrong when a nurse is overstepping the existing regulatory limits in the licensing hierarchy), this works out fine. Expanding the role of nurse practitioners, EMT's and other paraprofessionals would probably be a good thing. The MD's could shed a lot of routine duties and focus on more complicated issues. The ever increasing sophistication of medical testing and IT diagnostics is already pushing this along.

Other countries do it differently. I had a conference some years back in Costa Rica and had a bottle of prescription medicine that went astray on the flight. I was grimly expecting a medical ordeal involving a real runaround, maybe a trip to an embassy doctor, and several international calls to get the prescription refilled. I started with the concierge at the hotel and asked him who to call. He phoned up the local pharmacy. Within 30 minutes, a pleasant young lady on a motor scooter arrived at the hotel with my meds. The U.S. overcomplicates a lot of things.

What we have traditionally done in medicine is akin to demanding that we have a certified chemical engineer on the back of every garbage truck, on the chance that someone will put a hazardous substance out in the trash.