Scapegoating "defund the police" is a distraction from the real issue - more guns, more crime, more death.

I still wish "reallocate police funding into separate services that have more specialized training so that police are not as thinly stretched and asked to do jobs they're not qualified for thus benefiting all sides of the community" was as catchy and easier to fit on a protest sign.

I like "demilitarize the police".

Shit, demilitarize the military while you're at it. XD

Thanks for bringing this up. The slogan "Defund the police" has gone too far from the real issues in America and even Canada to some sort.

If some parts of the country did defund the police, it will make it much easier for criminals and mass shootings to happen. I think we should put more funding towards police departments and ethically more training for the police officers.

Of course, I could see why their mad, because of the neglect of the officers in the George Floyd incident.

'About the uvalde's school shooting incident'

The police budget in Uvalde makes up 40% of the town's founding. And yet, the other percentage goes towards other things, including, health, schools and the vast equipment. Uvalde spends about 4 million dollars on policing in the small town, (That might be low, but it's a small town.) The main reason why officers failed on stopping the situation, is that they were incompetent and dull in the shooting, waiting for orders to go in the schools, and even though they were there for an hour when the school shooter was on a rampage killing kids.


And two weeks after the school shooting there was another shooting on July 4th independence day in America. The country should focus on gun control and pay attention to the real issues.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/08/americans-gun-control-truth-complicated
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-28/why-police-funding-makes-up-40-uvalde-s-city-budget

Wow… I didn’t know the police budget in Uvalde was so high. That is a devastating point against the idea that “Fund the Police” is a solution.

In any other context, fiscal conservatives would tell you that simply increasing a department’s funding without a real plan results in administrative bloat.

In the case of overfunded police departments, you get absurdities like overstocking on military-grade equipment that hardly ever (and should never) be used, putting officers behind desks rather than out on the street, and putting officers on the street that have no business being there simply because they’re a warm body who needs a job and wants to boss citizens around a cushy public-sector union salary.

So gun sales go up whenever there's a school shooting... That's a sign of healthy society.

We could further complicate the picture by noting that previous waves of gun-buying didn’t translate into as large of a bump in violent crime/murder — though I do see a bump in 2016 that is correlated with the panic-buying around the San Bernardino shooting that happened in December of the previous year.

So: what explains the uniquely bad rise in crime rates from 2020 to today? The one conservatives love to dub “Biden’s crime wave” even though it started under Trump?

Well, in addition to igniting a gun-buying frenzy, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced massive economic and social disruptions that *also* fueled a rise in property and violent crime. Again, a rise that is seen across-the-board in America, regardless of local police-related policies.

The pathetic Uvalde police response makes the point even more starkly: police officers are a security blanket, at best. They may help at the margins, and I’m not claiming we should “abolish the police” or anything that extreme, but the fact remains that the root causes of crime are unmitigated economic and social ills on the one hand, and access to guns on the other hand.

We’ve known that for decades. The past couple years merely drive the point home further.

However, I would like to see MAGA-inclined rural jurisdictions double or triple their local police budgets to put their money where their “Blue Lives Matter” mouths are, if that’s how they really feel, so we can see even stronger data for the proposition that the funding levels of police departments aren’t meaningfully correlated with crime rates whatsoever.