Comment by kerneloftruth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kerneloftruth | Hacker News Reader

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There has indeed been defunding and redirecting funds to other purposes...and several cities have recently reversed course due to the uptick in crimes:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/08/13/at-leas...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/refund-the-police-cities-a...

https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2021/11/15/denver-refunds...

...and others easily searched.

Also, I'm leery of "There is only really one issue". The environment and climate are very real concerns, but a singular focus leads to zealotry and extremism -- which are discredits the cause(s) they're advocating. Anti-abortion activists learned that bombing clinics and assassinating doctors did not help their cause.

From what I can tell, studies that have tried to find a correlation between police funding (and rare, temporary "defunding" efforts) have come up with very little. In some cities that reduced police funding, crime rose. But then in some other cities that increased police funding, crime rose. And vice versa in other cities.

And the overall magnitude of the budget cuts is tiny. Even the examples you cherry picked, the budget cuts are hilariously small compared to recent increases. For example, your last link shows that Denver has been increasing its police budget ~5% a year since 2017 (well above inflation), and they decreased it by 0.75% for a single year during a pandemic. That's a city that's seen a 75% overall increase in police funding since 2012 and still has a visible upward crime trend that clearly predates the "defund" movement (http://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/wp-content/uploads/Per-c...)

This is exactly the kind of statistical nothingburger you'd expect to see if someone was inventing an issue to try to make people emotional and distract them from real problems.

> bombing clinics and assassinating doctors did not help their cause.

What evidence do you have of this?

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