Who is going to answer "yes" to that question?

However, “defund the police” as a slogan is completely idiotic and gives the GOP an unexpected gift that they’ll use to scare the pants off of people from now until November.

It's completely unreasonable and majority of the people are not going to be supportive of that idea. You can defund the police when there is no crime, and we are far from that happy state.

How to police a mostly proper civilized society.

https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/yougov-poll-finds-only-16-americans-want-to-defund-the-police-65-oppose/

I think your assessment is right, it is a good way to lose elections

Firing racist cops, and reorganization and reform is one thing, but defunding and elimination of the police is a losing issue, and I expect we will hear the GOP trying to use this idea against us

Fortunately Biden and most Democrats do not subscribe to such an experiment, and neither do most Americans

Two separate things.

Without funding, police is going to be abolished. So defunding and abolishing is the same thing.
Regardless, I fail to see how either defunding or abolishing police is a reasonable idea.

Not quite. You can gut funding for special toys like riot armor and armored vehicles without abolishing the police.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=13556849

It is called over playing your hand, and a good way to lose an election

is a clear recipe for disaster.

The Mpls Police Union is incredibly powerful, its power needs to be chipped away incrementally, as its power was consolidated in stages. Wholesale change, while desired, is usually thwarted and ineffective.

doesn't support, couldn't come up with an answer to "do you support this" that wasn't "no." He needs better advisors.

sounds great,but,it will not happen. What needs to happen is a true Citizen Review Board with the power to act in a lawful many to discipline Cops in a meaning full way including Criminal Action and removal from duty permanently.

At the same time,the Training Academy and Hiring Process has to be completely overhauled and any training towards a Warrior type Cadet eliminated period.

Vetting vetting and more vetting.

When you tell one of the few people in power willing to come there to go home, when you shame potential allies, how exactly do you expect to get any meaningful change?
You just want to feel good about yourself and express your anger than actually help anyone else.
They had no clue what they wanted until recently latching onto this idea of "defunding" which none of them has a clear idea what exactly that entails. Truly pathetic group of people.

https://www.aclu.org/report/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police

The idea behind the defund movement is solid. The implementation is not. Taking much of what the police do currently and shifting that to different trained professionals sounds very good and indeed is a step that must be taken. Having people with guns showing up to mental health calls exclusively in then end is counter productive.

The police do a lot of what others could and should be doing, indeed probably more then the actual things we think police are there to do. What we have over time done is use the police as the social medics, first in on a whole host of things.

So shrinking the force and replacing those functions with differently trained professionals make sense. That is of course until budgets get done and places to save money are needed, or until one of those professionals is sent to something they cannot handle.

As someone upthread said, remove funding for shit like armored vehicles and what-not. The only cities that need things like that are major metro areas in which police may need to respond to major crimes in progress, terrorist attacks, etc. For the cities that do have them, there needs to be a clear policy on when such things come into play. "Because we bought it, we oughta use it" isn't a good enough reason to roll out what's basically a tank on wheels.

Abolishing the police, on the other hand, is the stupidest thing I think I've ever heard, and is not workable in the society we have today. It is the exemplar of pie-in-the-sky idealism that completely ignores reality.