If we demolished the police to spend instead on social services and taking care of more people with mental illness, improving fire and EMT services, and providing a very small number of detectives to handle investigating significant crimes, I believe my specific county would be overalls safer. The idea that maintaining public order takes a cop with a gun for every 300 or 400 citizens is just ludicrous. I live in a county with a large rural area and even here we have a cop with a gun for every 600 to 700 citizens which is still far too many. There are over 100 CHP for about 25 miles of highway in the area, for Pete's sake.