Republicans spent decades robbing social services and equipping police with military-style hardware. Time to reverse that

Defund the police doesn't even mean what it sounds like.
It means more like "demilitarize the police, and allocate all the excess funding so that we can do better things with them"

Education in the U.S gets more funding than the military and roughly (if I did my mental math right) six times that of law enforcement.
It's a huge black hole of inefficient spending, yes, but it does get the money.

As far as police funding goes...I don't see how much can be cut. Things like payroll and benefits are non-negotiable unless you want to turn away good people. Vehicles, tech (cameras, the huge databases needed to store camera footage, etc), and personal gear such as radios, protective gear, taser/handgun (and all expenses needed to give each officer the training needed to be competent with 'em) are all non-negotiable as well and vary widely with the needs of each community.

I suppose you could try trimming expenses by reducing some heavier gear/weaponry carried by most officers and somewhat expanding SWAT units to compensate, but I'm not a policymaker and have no clue if that would be practicable anywhere.

Point is, law enforcement in the U.S is expensive by nature because we criminalize a LOT with our legal code and don't do much to actually reduce conditions that incentivize crime...I feel the police force isn't the "pressure" point in the system, but are being treated as if they are.

We could stand some demilitarization. American cities don't need to look like 1970s Belfast.

Seems the way to do that would be reducing crime in those areas.

That's a policy issue, not an enforcement issue.

really though the police help us a lot. a few incidents of racist police officers isn't really enough to defund the police in my opinion.

although if you're going to argue, I wanted to let you know that what those specific police officers did was wrong and they should be put in jail for it.