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The reason people think defunding the police might work is because American police are overly militarized and people speculate that plays into violence escalation.

Basically, if you give the police way too many guns and armored vans then they might start thinking those are appropriate tools for too many circumstances. Sort of "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type argument.

I don't know if it'll work, but that's the idea.


So you're erecting a straw man and attacking that. My assertion is that policing in the US has structural issues that need to be addressed. I disagree that it's helpful to remember that it could be worse as evidenced in other countries. That's irrelevant to the original assertion.

Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.


I don't think we should defund most police agencies in the US. I absolutely think that we need to defund ICE, throw a substantial number of its current employees in jail, and build a new immigration enforcement agency from the ground up. Nobody who authorized masked raids by the secret police can be trusted to enforce the law and I do not consider any agency who employs them legitimate.


If I tried to abduct someone from my local courthouse, do you think the cops would let me get away with it? Because they've worked in lockstep with ICE as they've done exactly that. Defunding the police and defunding ICE are not two separate issues.


Cops routinely let private bounty hunters abduct people, albeit not from courthouses so often. I'm not happy about it, but I don't know if I necessarily want my local cops to be equipped to fight the Gestapo.




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