Quote:
Originally Posted by flylock shox
CR, I'm curious to know what your thoughts would be on increasing funding to the various social agencies/programs that could offload some of the responsibilities currently held by police, but without reducing police funding.
Aside from being a terrible slogan for all sorts of reasons, I'm not actually sure "defund the police" is what people who advocate for it actually want. Don't they really want better funding for social agencies/programs, and some of these agencies handling matters that the police are currently tasked with? It doesn't seem to me that the funding of these agencies/programs must come from police budgets.
In fact, it could be argued that by offloading some of the social duties police perform, their resources could be better spent on complex criminal investigations and better training.
|
Where else does the money come from? Look at LAs city budget for example, the LAPD gets 38.8% of the total departmentary budget for the city, the next highest department is LAFD at a little more than 1/3 of that. Does the LAPD really need $10m in new equipment every year? When the entire city budget for new equipment is only $11.6m? I'm going to go with no.
Defund is a common term for budget cuts, I doubt it's a coincidence this is the only topic in which people "misinterpret" it.