[endogui]

If the staff in your local monopoly grocery store is underperforming, do you defund the store? How about your engineering company? In each case, the solution is to replace/remove under-performers while increasing funding, rather than to defund.

This is what Camden did when they "defunded": dissolve the city police, bringing the city under county sheriff jurisdiction, then pay for new staffing at the county level. They may have been able to save some money because they broke the police union, but in the long term funding increased.

[coenhyde]

But the grocery store doesn't do surgeries or tennis lessons. If the grocery store was responsible for surgeries and doing a bad job, i absolutely would defund them and give the money to surgeons instead. Surgeons are trained at doing surgery. See what i did there? Same applies to police dealing with mental ill people. Mental health professionals should be involved instead.

This sounds like an absurd analogy but only because America doesn't know how to operate community services in any other way than with a heavy police force. It's a failure of imagination and / or unwilling to look at the rest of the world for successful examples of alternative methods.