Defunding Police

Defunding the police is a good and practical idea, and it's because of a lack of knowledge on the subject, the rich history of police/prison abolitionism, and deep poverty of imagination that people write it off.

Police departments are enormous sinks of municipal funds, which are mostly wasted or go to harmful incarceration--police are used as the primary tool against a city's social problems but they make it worse. Empirically, decades of budget increases haven't decreased crime--experiments have slashed budgets and seen crime go down.

The key is, the money we spend on police and incarceration, we spend on social programs to stop the social causes of problems. It is way more efficient and frankly the US police/prison systemjust make everything cyclically worse