> Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.
Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution?
I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea that is not used in any country with a successful policing track record.
As for your claim that individual districts can’t take action....why? Cambden did. They’re hardly perfect, but it’s an improvement. They’re a local area.
And this story shows that when they did try cutting funding, before the reforms and it didn’t solve the problem. Only a concerted reform effort did.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
Comment above was heavily downvoted, but no one has provided a meaningful reply to the stats. The numbers are clear. Compared to places with better policing, the US has a smaller number of officers per capita, and spends less.
The US does spend much more on prisons however, which is surely a mistake. To your point on shifting focus away from punishment this is one of the first places I would look to cut money: prisons.
In the UK, police killed only 3 people in 2019. There has been surprisingly little inquiry as to how they do it. I get that US police are bad, and so spending less money to get less of them might be an improvement. But to actually solve the problem it seems that changing the police is the better answer. And this will necessarily be local because most of the important stuff in the US is local.