Mercenaries instead of Police

Mercenaries sound cool as fuck in fiction, but in reality it'd just really suck for everyone who has to pay for them. There's a reason why the colonists complained about having to quarter British troops,

A. They can't complain because the soldiers have guns,

B. The soldiers have guns,

C. They have to pickup expenses created by the soldiers

It's really not as cool as it would sound.

A private enterprise would generally undercut the public enterprise on the lucrative stuff, and not do the inconvenient at all. (public enterprises are generally implemented to make sure everyone gets service, such as the post office being required to deliver to ALL addresses, not just the convenient ones.) Terrible idea in almost all cases. Most public enterprises are to provide essential services, deal with nescessary monopolies (like railway infrastructure), or to provide superior accountability (the armed forces). If those aren't needed, don't have a public option at all, and if they are, don't undermine it with a private company to fuck it all up with improper motivations (money, instead of civic duty).

Not saying they have to eliminate the private sector, just make it avilable. For example. Fire Department is handled by the government. Why not give people the option of having a private Fire Department ? It's by no means a requirement, just the option. A choice.

And I am saying that in almost all cases, you will have a private corporation, concerned with profits rather than actually providing the service, fire all the trained firefighters, take all the modern districts with better anti fire practices and refuse service to all the old wood and cellulose insulation fire traps (and the trailer courts), hire some subcontractors with inferior training, and if something goes wrong, offload all liability to the idiots that are now doing a job they aren't qualified for and are no longer employees but subcontractors, and siphon off all the profits to a seperate parent through renting equipment at ridiculour rates and other shady methods so that in the event your new badly trained firefighters fuck something up royally, you can now just declare bankruptcy while protecting the money from legal claims because it's in a new company and it's identified as servicing debt rather than paying out profits. See Oil tankers each having their own unique numbered company to protect their parent companies from having to take responsibility for oil spills for an example.

It just isn't possible to have accountability in corporate culture, when private enterprises are specifically encouraged by profit motive NOT to allow themselves to be held accountable. If you have a service which is important, like keeping some guys around who know how to stop your whole block from burning down if your neighbor smokes in bed, you are retarded to put trust in a private company who has no particular motivation to stop that, but a very strong incentive to hollow out the expensive part of actually providing the service while ensuring they can't be touched legally if they fail to with their new inferior delivery capacity.

And mercenaries specifically: Terrible terrible concept. Just look at the current use of private military contractors in practice.

They cost fantastically more than soldiers. They are not accountable for their actions, and they alienate the people they deal with by not having the level of restraint that the accountable soldiers do, and unjustfied shooting of civilians is common. They are TERRIBLE for the morale of your government troops, but if you didn't have a superior governement force, a military coup would be practically assured.

Plus, there's the question of how you pay them. if you pay them a "cost plus", as in the American health care system, they are incentivised to carry out unnescessary and potentially harmful and dangerous operations simply to run up the bill by costing more money and therefore grossing more. But if you pay them by results, you get the constant arguments not about what needed to be done, but what was the absolute minimum that had to be done to technically get the mission across the goalposts for just long enough for the inspector to look it over and then you get the fuck out and who cares if it all falls apart.

Even if you are personally an ethical person, you generate a culture of poor conduct, which is incredibly corrosive to the morale of those who would aspire to be superior ethically, and those who are more pragmatic (about 90% of society), it simply creates the idea that if everyone is doing it, it must be acceptable.

The average citizen couldn't afford the kind of military hardware that would make him an effective military force. You would have no armor, no air support, no night vision goggles and predator drones and nuclear weapons and all the things that a modern army has. And you would have massively inferior training and coordination. Plus, people are long documented to be sheep. They don't organize till it is very late in the day, and they don't organize effectively. Especially if you have an organized opponent with the capacity for surgical strikes on your emerging leadership.

And the mercenaries would have all of those things. You are kidding yourself if you think some militia is going to hold it's own against professional soldiers in any time since World War II. Small arms are NOT how wars are fought, and the only reason they work at all in insurgency efforts is that the counter-insurgent forces are not simply willing to bomb the entire area into dust and who gives a fuck about civilian casualties. A mercenary army is not accountable, not loyal, and probably just wants the contents of your treasury. They will not shirk at using any weapon they may have, unlike Russia in Afghanistan, the US in Iraq, England versus the IRA, or other accountable governments. The only reason small arms work in current conflicts is because the modern army always is restrained by ethics and accountability, and LETS small arms play a role.