Why did my low-crime red town in a red state buy into flock?

If the police protected and served as they're asked they could get some funding. Not for tanks and spy cameras, but for trained officers.

The police are usually pretty good at their jobs, within reason. It's almost always going to take them several minutes at least to respond to your call, but when they do manage to arrive on the scene they are usually pretty good about eliminating the threat and rendering first aid/etc. There are some infamous cases where this severely broke down, instances of cops not entering an active crime scene and instead seeing fit to stop the public from taking matters into their own hands, but these instances are so notorious because of how unusual and counter to American values they were.

It's usually prosecutors and judges who drop the ball.

That is, unless you're black of course.

https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

Cops can't win that game. If they patrol black neighborhoods they're accused of profiling and discrimination. If they don't, they're accused of cowardice and again, discrimination. The cold truth is there are racial discrepancies in American crime statistics which can't be hand-waved away as manifestations of police bias, but nobody wants to talk about that.

We’re pretending our upper middle class SV bubble is reality. Poor and historically disadvantaged people don’t exist for the purposes of this conversation. /s

Travel through rural America sometime. The working class of America are fairly poor but still overwhelmingly support the police.

You know you don’t have to say it in so many words, “rural working class America” = poor white people. Of course they love the racist police (who used to catch slaves and enforce Jim Crow). And I say that as someone who grew up in rural America. I just happen to have read a few history books.

Half the people I work with in rural PA aren't white, you're just showing off your own racial bias with such an assumption. They still overwhelmingly support the police.

Thanks for the anecdote. Now let’s look at the numbers, where you will see a strong correlation between both income AND race and support for the police: https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/policing-america-underst...

Get out of your liberal urban centers and you'll find that in most of America the police are very popular and it has nothing to do with income or race. Low income? That means crime effects you even more, which is more reason to support the police. Live in a very white part of the country? The overwhelming amount of crime will come from other white people, and accordingly most of the arrests will be of white people. And yet the people of those communities still support the police with borderline religious devotion.

Half the people I work with aren't white, and roughly half aren't straight either. By internet stereotypes they'd be judged to be progressive liberals who want police reform but in actuality my car is one of the few in the parking lot that isn't a pickup truck with "back the blue" decals on it.

Another point of fact: When democrats trash the police they start losing elections. Even most people who usually vote democrat get demoralized and stay home when the election turns to anti-police rhetoric. The only people who really hate the police are career criminals, people adjacent to career criminal lifestyle and culture (their families, etc) and of course rich liberals who can easily afford to insure all their property, live in controlled access communities and never have to interact with the criminal elements of society except on their own terms.

Unsurprisingly you completely ignore the link I sent and keep yapping about the people you work with. Facts and evidence are pointless with you people.