With a New York Times editorial condemning the New York Police Department's work slowdown as "reckless" "madness" that is "damaging the social order," perhaps it's worth considering the — heretical, I know — possibility that less police activity might actually not be such a bad thing.
Not all situations without police degenerate into violent anarchy, after all. Many of them evolve into patterns of spontaneous order. One way to see that is this YouTube video of traffic in Vietnam (here's another, shorter one). No one is directing the traffic, yet most everyone gets where they are going safely.
Think of all the tax dollars that could be saved with fewer police, all the hassles that citizens could avoid by having to respond to fewer parking tickets. I'm not suggesting that the police are entirely superfluous. They play an important role in counterterrorism and in capturing violent criminals, among other things. But a share of the work that is now done by police (or that was done before the strike) might be done by citizens themselves maintaining order on a voluntary or private basis — by doormen, by Boy Scouts, by the guy behind the counter at the corner store, by school administrators and teachers.