It’s one of those things that’s true, while also being misleading. Or maybe over simplified would be a better choice of words, I dunno.

It really doesn’t matter what system you have, even anarchy, because at some point, there’s a threat that if you don’t go along with the majority, there will be consequences.

Those consequences may or may not involve police. And the majority may all share both the same socioeconomic group (as would be the case with full, proper anarchy), and ethnicity, while still exercising the threat of the majority.

Laws are nothing more than spelling out what actions will and will not be open to action by the majority.

Even if you don’t call the grouping of people a nation, it is a de facto nation once you have a group working together in a way that restricts the actions of others. Doesn’t really matter if the group is three people sharing an entire jungle, or three roommates in an apartment, all agreements rely on both the good behavior of all parties, and the bare minimum threat of being excluded from the group.

That’s what a law is. It’s a very complicated way of saying “not in this house”. Obviously, the more people there are, the more representative the organization is (as opposed to being purely democratic, or other consensus based systems), the more distant the individual is from making those laws, but it doesn’t change that it’s all the same thing, just at different scales.

Police are, at the heart of what they represent, the people that make other people obey the majority. If that’s two roommates evicting the third by ostracism, by threat, by action, that’s still the same thing.

The exact nature of the “majority” that current police in any of the nations any of us are likely from may vary. As you said, it could well be a minority that simply hold the threat of withdrawal of funding via socioeconomic control, and thus control the police despite being a numerical minority. But that still exists as an extension of a more simple majority.

That more simple majority is the mass of people that don’t care, or want the status quo, or think they stand to gain more with the system as is, even though they aren’t actually dominant in any way.

The reason all of that matters is that we all have to understand what power we do and don’t have in order to have a hope of changing things.

That’s one of those statements that sound deep until you think about it for 2s.