Professional police forces didn't crop up until around the mid-Nineteenth century.
Before that, it was like the joke about the town too small to have a regular town drunk-- so we all took turns.
I've made the case that professional police forces only came into existence because of the large-scale immigration (of European peasants, mostly Irish) and internal migration (of freed slaves) to cities in the Northeast. The governing classes of these cities simply decided that disorder and chaos would rule the day if the Second Amendment was applied to these people. It's no coincidence that police departments came into existence right around the same time that the first gun control laws were passed.