The Police (n.) is not men in blue uniforms but laws and customs that regulate behavior.
Police (n.) is the totality of measures which make work possible and necessary..
Police (n.) was, for seventeenth-century authors, not an institution inside the state but a whole governmental technology — the domains, techniques and targets where the state intervenes.
Police (n.) once embraced everything — 'its true object is man': living, active, productive man, his property, trade, illnesses and accidents.
Police (n.) was meant to give people a little extra life, and so give the state a little extra strength, by controlling their common activities.