If you can’t trust your police with it, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your society.
This announcement coincides with protests against police brutality, at which many police have behaved brutally. That was sparked by an outright homicide by a police officer, captured on video, of a man who was subdued and presented no threat -- while other police officers watched, and many others have subsequently attempted to justify.
The "something fundamentally wrong" is very complex and subject to genuine debate, but it's not subject to debate that whatever it is, people don't trust the police.
Isn't "defund the police" 99% "that's a nice slogan", not actually "we'll be good without any form of law enforcement"? From what I understand it's a play to break unions: you defund and dismantle the police department and then you can create a new department, can start fresh with new people, new tactics etc pp. Might work, might not, but it's certainly not "eliminate policing".
No.
> not actually "we'll be good without any form of law enforcement"?
Not that, either.
“Defund the police” is about shifting substantial amounts of funding from police to supportive/responsive social service instead of law enforcement.
> From what I understand it's a play to break unions:
That's probably true of some supporters of the related-but-distinct abolish/dismantle effort, but even there it's not the main focus.
> you defund and dismantle the police department and then you can create a new department, can start fresh with new people, new tactics etc pp.
Dismantle/abolish does allow that, but most of the push for it is not for abolish-and-directly-replace, but for rethinking public safety and community services more generally and redesigning how law enforcement fits into it. While any replacement includes law enforcement personnel employed somewhere, they may not include a single large centralized paramilitary organization like the dominant model for city police / county sheriffs offices, and might (for instance) involve domain-specific law enforcement officers embedded in a variety of different public agencies.
It can, and for many people does, mean abolishing (not merely replacing) police departments as institutions, but, yes, it does not mean abolishing the law enforcement function of government.
I want to see suggestions, for any major city, how much of their budget we should cut (as percentage and gross) as well as where this funding should go as a percentage of how much funding already goes to that place.
Apologies if this is readily available, I haven’t seen it yet.