british transport police

There's less than 3000 British transport police officers covering the entire country. I've never seen one preventing intimidating disorder and criminal damage late at night and I've never before seen one at my local station. Until this morning that is, when the train company, BTP's bosses, had a platform full of potentially irate customers who have been contractually screwed over by paying for a nonexistent service. In a proper free market this could not be the case. It's only a state supported monopoly that can treat customers like that and its only a state supported monopoly that can hire a police force that does not serve the interests of It's customers. BTP aren't directly tax funded so they have even less financial incentive to address the concerns of customers than regular police. BTP are 95percent funded by the train operating companies and network rail. 30percent of The board of the BTP authority is comprised representatives of the train operating companies and network rail. Nothing wrong with that at all if the train companies were answerable solely to their customers through profit motives and the train police were therefore provided at the service of the customers. But due to state involvement the train companies care less about keeping their customers happy and more about satisfying the state regulators that dish out the lucrative operating licenses. And those regulators are not really answerable to rail customers cos how do you vote for better rail service? If the state wasn't in charge of choosing which companies supplied rail services then 3rd parties who believed they could make more money by better fulfilling the needs of customers would perform hostile takeovers and we would all have cheaper, faster, safer rail travel.
I'm all in favour of private police that do what the customer wants in order to make a profit. I feel safer in a privately owned space like a club than on the publicly owned streets. The owner of the club wants to make money and he can't do that if people don't feel safe in his club. So he hires security to stop his customers attacking each other. Public police get paid your money whether you're safe or not.
(of course I do realise that in a market free from privilege, protectionism and subsidy I may well be unable to afford rail travel)