# Defunding The Police



## gn1g (Aug 14, 2020)

What are your thoughts on defunding the police?

 divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community.

I am not a fan of it, heaven forbid I need help.


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## Kanky (Aug 14, 2020)

I think that city budgets are a mess because of Covid and that the police will be defunded in a lot of places. However they will not reallocate money to social services and community support. Crime will go up, services will go down and they will blame BLM and black people in poor neighborhoods for what is a failure of government response to a national crisis.


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## Lylddlebit (Aug 14, 2020)

I like the idea of police being privatized and part of the communities they police.  I do not think that most people have the efficiency  to protect themselves without the  ability to call the police.  Even though a lot of people are buying guns right now it's a false sense of security if they barley know how to use them or starts shooting at someone who has actual tactical and preparedness skills developed before Covid.   I don't want to ramble about how stress causes people to behave worse than normal.   Many people will be fine without the police, but there are more people who really need police access to stay protected.


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## guudhair (Aug 14, 2020)

I’m against it and feel it’s not a good idea.


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## CarefreeinChicago (Aug 14, 2020)

Before all of this crime in Chicago had low clearance rates so I guess that means they will go even lower


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## ladysaraii (Aug 17, 2020)

I think that it *could* work, but I want to see exact plans about where the funds would go, which agencies, etc. I do think there are police functions that would probably be better off in other agencies and this will allow the police to focus on actual police functions.

My big concern is that 1) it will be defunded without a plan and without transition and 2) that the agencies they want to fund are ones that frequently get their funding cut and it will be all for naught.


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## Kalia1 (Aug 17, 2020)

I don’t agree with defunding per se yet funds do need to be reallocated to address community issues that have been overlooked and ignored.


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## gn1g (Aug 18, 2020)

I am not a fan of defunding, I think we will have higher rates of domestic murders, murders period and wild wild west situations.  Are your neighbors going to really come to your aid if you need help?  People already don't want to get involved in other folks lives.

*I could be making the case for defunding:  We have situations in South Dallas where it currently takes the police 2-4 hours to arrive after a 911 call is made.  South Dallas is predominately the African american ghetto


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## Kanky (Aug 18, 2020)

I think that they need to stop using the police to generate fees from poor (mostly black) people to fatten up city budgets. They need to raise taxes or cut services to make the budgets work instead. In a lot of places the city's budget is very dependent on giving black people a lot of tickets and fines for minor things. White middle class people won't put up with being policed in that way, but they benefit from the lower taxes and increased services that poor black people's funding provides. There are also a lot of local government jobs that are created by doing this. Defunding the police, or reducing the police budget and redirecting the money to social services won't solve that. Notice that whenever the police get mad and go on strike they stop writing nonsense tickets. When the NYPD did this, and serious crime actually went down but the city's budget took a huge hit.


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## RoundEyedGirl504 (Aug 29, 2020)

The problem with defunding the police is that they can hold the community hostage effectively and decide to not do their jobs which generally ends up screwing people on the areas with more issues I.e. black and Latino areas.


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## kxlot79 (Aug 31, 2020)

My primary issue with “defund the police” is essentially that the people most in need of police, and taxed the highest for relative cost of living, will  need *even more *policing (because crime will become incalculably worse for the most violent and egregious of offenses) yet be in the same financial state that won’t allow them to move to safer areas.

(I have seen this up close on the microcosm as dozens of acquaintances lament to me their dire
financial straits that has them moving to the hood, where everything about their quality of life drops and cost of living is just as high or higher than when they lived in pricier rent neighborhoods.)


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## nyeredzi (Sep 18, 2020)

Lots of police activity is not necessarily crime-related, or at least not violent crime. So you end up with a bunch of people carrying guns, trained for violence, handling situations that don't have to escalate to violence. More nuanced calls for defunding don't necessarily advocate not having a force to handle crimes of violence, but rather having alternative government or civic groups handle some things. I personally think it's ridiculous to have 30%, 40%, 50% of a city's entire budget going to the police.

We definitely should look at defunding and reallocating some prison funds, because it feels like a crime against humanity that we basically have prisons function as mental health wards, and spend money imprisoning people with mental health issues rather than spending money on actual mental health treatment.


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