Drug laws would need to change first before any dent in organized crime. And there's still sex work, and good old influence peddling, etc. And then still there'

Drug laws would need to change first before any dent in organized crime. And there's still sex work, and good old influence peddling, etc. And then still there's a long way to go with immigration reform. (Undocumented immigrants are a very vulnerable and lucrative victim group. From human trafficking to no-contract cash-only jobs, the classic sweatshop model, and more.) At this point, I'm fairly certain that it's a pipe dream to assume that it's possible to "fix it" without serious sustained effort (which costs some money obviously) and without also drastically improving the adjacent systems (as you said also). Sure, we can call it social services, but the goal is to really reduce both crime and police brutality. It's a complex problem, but very simply the funding issue is that militarization was cheap (because military handed off a lot of things for cheap/free), and any and all social service thing got more expensive simply due to big "external" factors like the Baumol effect (human labor is relatively getting more expensive compared to anything that benefits from capital investment, ie. industrialization, mass production, technological progress), the Southern Strategy culminated, War on Drugs revved up, social polarization increased, inequality shoot up, these all led to more crime, more tough-on-crime programs, more people in the criminal justice system, and that's a lot more expensive. And of course reintegration and related social programs got worse for the same reasons. See also https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-mor...