You can abolish the police, if you want to, and you get enough people on board. Somewhere in my comment history is a lengthy discussion I had with someone about the idea. There are actually a handful of examples to draw on of in-US communities that functioned without police: Among them the libertarian takeover of a small town in New Hampshire, and the community described in “Wild Wild Country” on Netflix. The Freak Party attempted takeover in Aspen is another example, although they didn’t succeed and they weren’t talking about complete abolition anyway. There are also quite a lot of unincorporated communities where any day-to-day presence of police is basically nonexistent, and where even that nominal county-level police oversight could be cancelled out with a single abolitionist sheriff winning a single election.

If you want to see the wider discussion or continue it, I’m up for that. Overall, I’m saying that the claim that “they” won’t let there not be police is false. “They” in the sense of, the consensus of the people in the city/county/whatever is that there should be police, and the general institutional and capital resistance to abolition, is absolutely true. But if you can win the right elections, or just set up your own place separate enough from existing administrative structures, you can to a pretty large degree already have this, in the present day. The system’s resistance to it is real, but it’s not indomitable.