We ALSO shouldn't ignore that behind the black murder rate is a pre-defund-the-police failure of the police, as a whole, to prioritize crimes against black victims in the same way they do against white victims.
"Get rid of police" can be a naive reaction to the newly-enabled broader exposure of police racism (violently racist cops are no new surprise to minorities!) at the same time as "actually, the police are good" can be a naive counter-reaction.
(And there are some very good ideas in the details of the general "defund" proposals - sending non-lethally-armed responders to handle non-violent interactions or traffic stops, say, is a good way to avoid needless escalation into someone's death, while in no way requiring us to get rid of cops that would investigate shootings.)
Or the correlation/causation fallacy of assuming that new gun purchases (primarily in the suburbs) drove the spike in murders because it's politically inconvenient to assume significant departures of police officers in cities like Minneapolis might be a more potent correlating event to investigate?
50% of the gun murder victims in the USA are Black, and the vast majority of these murders (like all murders in the US) involve a perpetrator matching the ethnicity of the victim. The human beings who live in these neighborhoods feel like their safety has "collapsed", and they certainly aren't right wing reactionaries. They just don't want every summer holiday weekend to involve kids getting shot in crossfire between rival gangs. The polling data reveals this rather markedly.
Here's a Gallup poll (a few months after George Floyd's murder by Derek Chauvin) which shows that 81% of Black Americans want the police presence in their community to remain the same or be increased.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
It's almost as if the ivory tower, academic egghead activists who CLAIM to represent Black Americans weren't elected and shouldn't be viewed as if they were.