Yeah, I'm explicitly not calling for the return to night watches. I'm saying it should be possible to imagine societies without uniformed police forces, because we've had many models for justice without them in the past. We could, with some effort, imagine something better.
That's the bad alternative, for sure. I'm an anarchist (not the purge, but instead self organizing local communities kind). I genuinely believe that much of the role can be done by local community, reserving only the most violent and extreme things for a uniformed force.