Like some others I'm a little skeptical of the budget argument. A lot of the equipment that one would typically see employed for a protest or riot response (riot gear, crowd control weapons, armored vehicles) are often obtained via funding from federal Homeland Security and DOJ grants. Hitting the local city/county budget wont impact the militarization argument, and with a president like Trump, I can easily see an increase in federal grants swooping in to offset that, at least partially.

My second concern is that pay for police is often considered not great. Hitting the city/county budget will likely impact salaries, pay increases, health care benefits, vehicle maintenance, and many other areas. Sadly the fastest thing to get cut from municipal agencies is often training, so I'm skeptical we can "defund" the police while simultaneously adding additional training requirements around mental health, de-escalation, etc.

I'm not inherently against the defund argument, particularly when it involves shifting those funds toward more community services that would reduce crime and poverty anyways. It just seems like the problem has less to do with the amount of money police departments actually have and more to do with a lack of oversight on how they're spending it.