Also just to be clear policing (AKA Town Watch in D&D) is a completely modern invention that begins in north and quickly expands throughout the whole nation in the mid-1800s so that really allows us to understand d&d’s social formations as a post-1850s space at the very least

And another since Rourke retweeted this is that it’s interesting to think about how the colonial becomes the domestic, as in the case of British domination in Ireland during the same period, and how the technologies of policing developed abroad they then returned to the metropole

So police and colonial formations are often very similar, with policing being that very same colonial technology returned to bear upon ones own citizenry, often the racialized or the poor or the displaced within the colonizing country itself