I don't think you can safely infer that absolute ("only") from the parent comment. Nevertheless...

1. Police are often a large percentage of a city budget, so if all city expenditures were decreased equally, it would inevitably look like the police were giving up more in absolute terms.

2. If the current solution to the problem is only more policing, then the only thing in the "solution to this problem" sub-budget that could be reduced is the police. In other words if X is the amount allocated to the problem and X is currently 100% police, it may be worth rebalancing X to a more diversified portfolio.

We can safely infer it because:

1. That's the only thing they suggested, and they framed it as either/or "If you have infinite funding, you can do both." (Implies we cant do both, because we obviously dont have infinite funding)

2. The overarching context of this conversation is about "defunding the police"

>If the current solution to the problem is only more policing

Is anyone seriously suggesting that? If so, its safe to discount these types of facile absolutist views ("we need more police to solve the problem" & "We need to eliminate the police to solve the problem")

Edit: I'd like to add thay I jusy reviewed my cities budget, and was surprised to see how large the law enforcement budget was compared to everything else. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

Police spending is inadequately large because the threat of a police walk-out scares city governments than the threat of any other department striking.

Because budget is a tool for enforcing accountability when other tools have failed.