Of course this also misses the entire point of #defundthepolice. Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assum

Of course this also misses the entire point of #defundthepolice. Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assumption that the police could serve that purpose instead. But the police are trained to deal with potentially violent criminals and applying those techniques to the homeless or mentally ill only makes the problem worse and leads to tragedy. So the idea is you claw back the extra money the police departments need to handle cases like that (poorly) and greatly increase the funding for social workers and state mental health institutions. In reality the second part is a huge amount of work to set up and few if any governments have really tried to take it seriously. Most have not even freed up the money from police departments, and a few that have ended up giving it right back when they realized how much extra work it was going to make for them. The underlying theory is that if you fix the social safety nets then you won't need much of a police force, and in fact the social support programs are much cheaper than police and jails in the long run. But they are also "socialism" so we can't have that in this country.