The problem is, as in so many cases, fundamentally about power. Until police have less power (that is, less funding, fewer numbers, and a smaller scope of responsibilites), i fear these kinds of abuses are almost unavoidable.
Part if this is because many other social services are cannibalized either due to drops in tax revenue, or in order to fund the constantly bloating police budgets.
Part of the "defund" process (I know, very poorly named!) is to take both responsibility off police shoulders and $$$ out of police budgets and put those dollars into social response.
A great example are mental wellness response to psychotic breaks among homeless. Rather than having police have to deal with hours of interaction (and police report paperwork), send in qualified health workers, i.e., those that have been trained for years to deal with this rather than a rookie cop with 6 months at the academy.
This would prevent cops from having to handle all kinds of other stuff, especially situations where they are not at all qualified to handle.
Building a camp out in the desert somewhere where people like this can get three square meals and a bed would both be an improvement on their present situation and a total money saver once you take into account all the problems and waste of police/ambulance time that they cause. Even better if you extend it to drug addicts.
If the police are substandard it means we need to pay them more to get better quality applicants into the system.
We also need a better funded prison/drug rehab system so that police don't have to waste their time dealing with the sort of habitual offenders who should have been permanently removed from society a long time ago.
There's no indication that funding is an actual problem that a lot of these "bad" departments face. Teachers regularly have to buy their own supplies for their classrooms. Have you ever heard of a cop needing pay out of their own pocket for ammo for their service weapon, gas for their patrol car, or batteries for their radios?
So it's natural such communities would want less money to go to police, which they probably see as victimizing a community, putting people in jail for low-level drug crimes and messing with people's jobs and livelihood through bail/fines, and more money to go to schools, which they see as helping a community and providing beneficial services.