Yes, that's true. Indigenous Americans had no police and no system of punishment for crimes. Bad human behavior was controlled by consent and was not that common. You lived in a community and the entire community would be shamed by your actions. Everyone would know, and your particular clan would be expected to pay reparations for what you had done. That would be a positive motivation to not commit crimes. And of course a lot of the motivation to commit them in the first place would be gone. However, I don't mean to suggest that all tribes lived like that. There were some authoritarian tribes as well, and some had social stratification as well as slaves. Same with the city states in early history. And I don't want to suggest that they were utopian, because we weren't there and I'm sure there were squabbles and some people hated each other, etc. They seem to have achieved unity, though, by having a particular deity they worshiped that was unique to the town, so there would have been rituals associated with that, and feast days and so on. That would have given each town a powerful sense of identity--"this is how we do things here and that's what makes us special."
That sounds like a utopian place and to think humans could pull it off. I had read that the first Americans did not need police.
Yes, that's true. Indigenous Americans had no police and no system of punishment for crimes. Bad human behavior was controlled by consent and was not that common. You lived in a community and the entire community would be shamed by your actions. Everyone would know, and your particular clan would be expected to pay reparations for what you had done. That would be a positive motivation to not commit crimes. And of course a lot of the motivation to commit them in the first place would be gone. However, I don't mean to suggest that all tribes lived like that. There were some authoritarian tribes as well, and some had social stratification as well as slaves. Same with the city states in early history. And I don't want to suggest that they were utopian, because we weren't there and I'm sure there were squabbles and some people hated each other, etc. They seem to have achieved unity, though, by having a particular deity they worshiped that was unique to the town, so there would have been rituals associated with that, and feast days and so on. That would have given each town a powerful sense of identity--"this is how we do things here and that's what makes us special."