This just looks like more conflation and a bad faith interpretation of what most people meant when they said “defund the police”.

CampaignZero.org is a good example of the policies desired to reduce violence caused by police on the population they police. Obviously not everyone agrees on what defund means, but that is why there are so many bad faith interpretations.

I personally have a really difficult time seeing US police as an institution that has justice as their highest priority:

(1) There are several departments that depend on civil asset forfeiture for more than 50% of their department revenue.

(2) NYPD kept arguing that Stop and Frisk took guns off the streets despite the dismal percentage of stops yielding an arrest and a complete ignorance of the trust damage caused in the communities where any young male could be interpreted to make “furtive movements”.

(3) The instructors for police use of force teach officers to assume the worst of every contact with any person, causing predictable lack of trust with non police. These instructors are generally pretty suspect.

(4) Police repeatedly interfere with people filming them while in public and in uniform. I haven’t heard any argument for this position that withstands scrutiny. It just looks like “we don’t like oversight” and “we fear a situation that causes accountability”.

(5) Police unions and systems that protect officers from accountability for their own actions. Beat cops tend to look at Internal Affairs cops with disdain. They push legislators for LEOBoR laws that give police additional protections from investigations that they don’t want to give to non-police. Cops scream about political prosecutions when a cop is arrested (and almost none are convicted) but are quiet when they arrest people on tenuous evidence.

(6) It doesn’t matter if 95% of those in uniform are strict law abiding, boring, non-corrupt, courteous, etc (I estimate that percentage is only accurate during training but the percentage falls off quickly the longer they are on the job) the rest are defended and kept on the job. Those corrupt officers and the “chain of command” and the culture of “cops versus civilians” means that lots of otherwise “good” cops end up being corrupted by the actions they choose to take to look away from extralegal/illegal actions. I have seen how this works in my family.

(7) Tolerance and normalization of violence on the riot lines. Usually when police have a large presence in riot gear, there are multiple departments contributing personnel and their id badges aren’t visible. Individual officers are almost never prosecuted for excessive force on the riot lines.

(8) Police almost exclusively get to set the publicly disclosed narrative after an act of violence. The police PR officer is trained to exclusively release information that helps the officers involved and the department. They purposefully will elide information that may incriminate or increase legal liability for the department.

(9) Asymmetric accountability. Officers have a department, a union, and a government jurisdiction to be accountable for them. Police aren’t willing to let the same court system they contribute to dole out their personal accountability. They like to see themselves as deserving more protection than the civilians they arrest.

(10) Cops wives/families are ridiculously entitled and corrupt when it comes to avoiding citations, tickets, and arrests. They trade in reputation and avoid using the legal paperwork. Arrests for the, not for me.

Source: I have a cop in my family so I both care about his well being and I am a citizen and tax payer so I care about my fellow citizens losing trust in the institution.