Really, you can replace police and laws with any form of more or less organized sanctions against the perpetrators.
Law and authority is a good read, but it shows exactly that - without centralized power, people do (and, according to Kropotkin, people should) put system of unwritten controls all by themselves. And that keeps us from sliding into the savage world where everyone preys on one another. But if something breaks in this chain, if we accept the violence against one another, we’ll get extinct very rapidly.
Really, you can replace police and laws with any form of more or less organized sanctions against the perpetrators.
Law and authority is a good read, but it shows exactly that - without centralized power, people do (and, according to Kropotkin, people should) put system of unwritten controls all by themselves. And that keeps us from sliding into the savage world where everyone preys on one another. But if something breaks in this chain, if we accept the violence against one another, we’ll get extinct very rapidly.