How many organizations have been improved throughout history via removal of funding? Will better qualified police officers get hired with less funding?

> Will better qualified police officers get hired with less funding?

The idea is that you remove half the police work load, hire half the officers, and use that savings to assign that removed work load to more appropriate people like social workers, unarmed traffic enforcement, etc.

Cost per officer doesn't have to change.

The point that some of these groups were trying to make (but failed miserably in their messaging) was that cities with well funded police departments often skimp on social services.

Indeed. ACAB and Defund The Police advocates have sullied a very real and reasonable response to a very real problem through aggressive messaging :/

It was a stupid chant that resulted in a stupider outcome.

It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC.

People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police need to behave to professional standards. Pandering to activists and not enforcing the law doesn’t benefit the actual people living with crime.

So now in many places we have police not acting on crime because Johnny Crackhead can trivially jam them up with frivolous complaints, yet police departments obviously struggle with self-policing. Good old fashioned audit and accountability is the oblivious, non-sexy solution.

Completely agree. There's a huge swath of moderate "non-sexy" solutions that the public could get behind--in 2020, something like 90% of Americans favored police reforms according to Gallup, which necessarily includes a bunch of Republicans. We could have got some combination of "require more police training", "reorganize internal affairs", "weaken police unions", "end qualified immunity", etc but instead progressives prioritized their personal catharsis to the detriment of everyone, but especially the communities of color who have to suffer the most from the crime surge, who never wanted a decrease of policing in the first place (80% of black Americans opposed de-policing in 2020), and in whose name progressives demanded a reduction in policing.

No doubt "defund the police" implies using some of the funds for social programs, but you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe that it doesn't mean "reduce the amount of policing" particularly when the slogan was chanted in tandem with demands to remove or reduce police from communities of color and so on. The main thrust of "defund the police" was to reduce the amount of policing, which is what we got, and crime has surged as predicted (especially in communities of color, 80% of whom didn't want less policing, but it was demanded in their name anyway). Moreover "disarm cops so they learn to deescalate" is not markedly better than "reduce the amount of policing", but rather it seems differently predictably awful.

Granted, social program funds haven't increased, but there's no world in which we invest more in education or mental health services or anything else and it makes up for the drop in policing with respect to deterring crime. If you keep policing in tact and invest more in public services, maybe over decades you'll see a significant improvement (because investing in public services doesn't pay out immediately), but if we divest ourselves of policing, then crime becomes a much more powerful and immediate drag on underserved communities than the lift afforded by investment in (non-policing) public services. We need policing and public services.

> And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.

Even if you count every police shooting as an unjustifiable homicide (on the order of hundreds), they are completely dwarfed by the non-police homicides (on the order of tens of thousands). Indeed, the increase in annual homicides is about 10k since the pre-BLM era (a ~60% increase)--the increase alone completely dwarfs all officer-involved shootings.