The point isn't to save money. It's to force reform by taking away the current police department's money.

(This is an excellent example of why the "defund" slogan is confusing; however, of the other suggestions I've seen in this thread, I haven't seen any that make clear the level of change that's needed.)

What do you expect to happen when you take away their ability to pay for reform?

I can think of a few things that will require more money: better/longer training for officers, and doing more investigations into citizen complaints. That stuff isn't free.

When you defund an organization and at the same time demand it does better, you create a siege mentality among the members of the organization. They will get worse, not better.

In a lot of places cops are paid for training and on the job while training. Why not have it be a 2-4 year training that they actually pay for out of pocket? You know like every other field in America?

Why should we subsidize their training?

Furthermore, maybe we make sure cops have 1 vest, 1 badge, 1 gun in a holster, ammo, and 1 tazer. Ban assault rifles, use USED cars, get rid of tanks, armored vehicles, etc... Get rid of tear gas, and explosive ordinances. Basically take away a LOT of their toys.

So gun, car, badge, uniform, vest, payroll and that's it. No paying any money at all to unions. Maybe even save some money for performance bonuses if they can lower their brutality outcomes as a collective body. Cops w/out any reports get like a 5k bonus at the end of the year. 20k after 10 years, etc...

At least in the cases where I've heard specifics, the intention is to essentially disband the existing police department and start a new one, that doesn't have the old bad police officers or the old union, protecting them from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

Brilliant.

And whilst you're building a new police force from scratch, who will be doing the policing in the meantime? Who will be appointed to create this new police force and how will they be chosen? What will they do the first time one of their new police officers gets shot? What will the city do if the brand new police force is incompetent because none of them have any experience? And then if they decide to unionise too?

Rebuild it from scratch rarely works out well in software. It's hard to imagine it working better for an entire police force.

Actually, it has been done before and seems to have worked: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/872470135/new-police-force-fr...

Well, that's not really building a new police force. She says the new force was largely made up of the same people as the old one. That's re-interviewing/re-assessing everyone, calling it firing+hiring is perhaps meaningful from a legal or contractual perspective, but from an outcomes perspective they could have done a rolling perf review + firings with new management and a big focus on cultural change, whilst preserving continuity of service. There was no discussion that they actually stopped policing for a few months whilst they did this re-assessment, so I suspect they were "fired" in a sense but were being told they'd still have a big chance to get their old jobs back. Otherwise a rolling "fire" and "rehire" wouldn't have worked.

That said whatever they did and whatever it was called, it apparently worked. But I wonder if that was due to this re-culturing vs the more practical aspect of using body cameras.

It doesn't appear to mention it in that article, but one aspect that gets brought up a lot with regard to remaking the police departments is replacing the union. In many cases, it's the local police union that's actively working to prevent investigation or prosecution of police misconduct and crimes.

Firing and re-hiring everyone, legally and contractually, lets you get rid of the existing union and work on building a new one that's actually focused on what a police officers' union should be focusing on: protecting good police officers from abuse and corruption from above, negotiating salaries and job conditions, etc., much like any other workers' union.