...let alone "coddling".
If we are to have law, we have to live by it. It can't be enforced from without. We have to demonstrate its value by following it ourselves.
If we don't like the law, we change it. That's what adults do. We don't take it into our own hands.
I also take this opportunity to remind you that the police are not really in the business of guarding things. Their job includes attempting to maintain an environment in which criminal activity is too difficult to bother with, and is easy to detect, but their main job is to apprehend criminals who are undeterred by these efforts. They can't do this without community cooperation. One citizen smacking around a suspect is not cooperation. It only makes their job more difficult by creating another level of crime to deal with.
The unwillingness of people to come forward and inconvenience themselves by active witnessing, filing complaints, appearing as witnesses in court, and other uses of private time for civic purposes, is more of a cause of civil society's deterioration than any perceived "coddling" of criminals. People in communities will inconvenience themselves for each other. We don't have much in the way of community in a lot of places. Punks will act like punks when they determine that nobody wants to take the time to stop them except people who act like they do.