No doubt "defund the police" implies using some of the funds for social programs, but you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe that it doesn't mean "red

No doubt "defund the police" implies using some of the funds for social programs, but you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe that it doesn't mean "reduce the amount of policing" particularly when the slogan was chanted in tandem with demands to remove or reduce police from communities of color and so on. The main thrust of "defund the police" was to reduce the amount of policing, which is what we got, and crime has surged as predicted (especially in communities of color, 80% of whom didn't want less policing, but it was demanded in their name anyway). Moreover "disarm cops so they learn to deescalate" is not markedly better than "reduce the amount of policing", but rather it seems differently predictably awful. Granted, social program funds haven't increased, but there's no world in which we invest more in education or mental health services or anything else and it makes up for the drop in policing with respect to deterring crime. If you keep policing in tact and invest more in public services, maybe over decades you'll see a significant improvement (because investing in public services doesn't pay out immediately), but if we divest ourselves of policing, then crime becomes a much more powerful and immediate drag on underserved communities than the lift afforded by investment in (non-policing) public services. We need policing and public services. > And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law. Even if you count every police shooting as an unjustifiable homicide (on the order of hundreds), they are completely dwarfed by the non-police homicides (on the order of tens of thousands). Indeed, the increase in annual homicides is about 10k since the pre-BLM era (a ~60% increase)--the increase alone completely dwarfs all officer-involved shootings.