I think for many people the talk about defunding is (completely understandably) overwhelming and hard to imagine. I really do get that. and what I also get is that many people know and/or have interacted with "good apples" and this answer seems extreme. so let's talk about that.

for me, I am deeply deeply uninterested in categorizing police (or people more generally) into good and bad. Its not a useful binary for me, and it allows people to escape accountability. that's just a personal practice of mine. people are complicated. police included.

I also don't think most people who do heinous things are "just wired" to commit harm. often, who someone becomes in these roles is very very different than what they imagined. some of these people came into this job swearing they would never do things they've done.

none of this is to absolve bad behavior, or focus excessively on the internal motivations of police, who ultimately have a responsibility to act with integrity, especially as armed state actors. but it is to make an important point, which is that policing today hurts everyone.

we have encouraged and perpetuated a system that allows, and even incentivizes, police to be their absolute worst selves. their least empathetic. their least dignified. their most brutal. extremely unwilling to speak up against the powers that be.

policing also incentivizes failure. right now, as I and many others have pointed out over the past few days, we solve approximately 40% of murders in many major cities in america. 40%. and that's more than the percentage of rapes and other serious crimes we solve.

the bottom line is this: policing doesn't work for people, but it also largely does not work for police.

we are asking police to do too much. we are asking them to be mental health professionals. we are asking them to be addiction experts. we are asking them to address issues rooted in poverty, we are asking them to be trauma experts.

and, unsurprisingly, it isn't working. even if you take brutality and killing people out of the picture entirely - even if the cops were not explicitly harming people every day - we would still have to reckon with the fact that police don't even solve crimes!!!

so who is this system good for? if the police in this country drew up a public safety system from scratch, is this what they would draw? why can't we create better systems that incentivize the people involved to access their humanity?

so yes, defunding the police is a necessary response to years of brutality and harm caused by policing in america. but the end goal is not to punish the police. the end goal is healthier systems, healthier communities, and healthier people - both civilians and cops.

public safety does not have to look like a war. do we have the courage to imagine something different?

(to be clear, I said healthier systems, both civilians and cops, but i'm not saying the answer is that in the future we have healthier cops. i'm saying people who are currently police officers will also live a healthier future away from the system we've created. k bye)