

In the UK, one of the first modern (ie publicly salaried) police forces was the Metropolitan police, founded in 1829 on the principle of “policing by consent” rather than by force. In other words, our police uphold the law because we want them to not because they have shooters.
Additionally, politically, there was a lot of disquiet about the formation of a paramilitary arm of the government when the army had been used to repress and supress in living memory. So the police were created to be clearly distinct from an armed military.
A guy I used to know got annoyed with some student neighbours who were kind of arseholes, but he was mostly annoyed with them for their frequent late, loud parties - like partying until 04:00 in the morning, shouting and screaming, vomitting on the pavement in front of the houses, etc.
Phase 1 spite involved booking in lots of tradespeople to come and visit them early in the morning so, eg, carpet fitters coming to measure up a room in their house at 08:30 on a Saturday morning and so forth.
Phase 2 spite involved pissing in an empty washing up liquid bottle and then squeezing a little stream of piss in through their letter box whenever they weren’t home. Not enough that it wouldn’t dry in a couple of hours, but that was the aim. Their hallway carpet got smellier and smellier as more and more piss dried on it.
Eventually they moved out and the landlord has to replace the carpet. The only problem. was that no carpet fitters would come out to that property any more.