[h2odragon]

Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. Often risking their reputation to do so, and being accused of racism, heresy, deviation-ism, and so on.

Now that crime has risen in the past couple years, it's amazing how many people never said "defund the police" and when confronted with the evidence that they did say that "din't mean it that way."

[quags]

I remember defund the police narratives. However despite these defund the police talks the majority of police budgets in the US continue to rise the last few years.

[bitcurious]

The performance of police, like of most professions, is highly impacted by morale. The defund narrative painted police work as inherently racist and oppressive, which obviously effected morale.

I don’t have any specific data, but it seems intuitive and cops themselves are talking about it. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009578809/cops-say-low-moral... and a bit here https://www.manhattan-institute.org/verbruggen-depolicing-al...

[quags]

Defund the police came out of specific incidents, normally resulting in deaths, which are now being covered by police body cams and filming. From my own perspective the morale being affected is tied to the usually narratives of what happened in the incidents no longer being backed up by what the camera shows. Defund is the wrong word in my opinion though - if this was another professional job it would be more police training. We shouldn’t see indigents of a traffic stop resulting in the death of a driver with multiple police involved. Or why can I ask someone who lives in the woods come up with multiple names of people killed by the police that were unarmed - I’m sorry the morale is down and that it affects job performance but it can’t be that we expect to have multiple unarmed people killed a year as a normal part of the job.

[sneak]

That's moving the goalposts.

People wanted to defund police. Police budgets stayed flat or went up. Crime increased.

Maybe we should try defunding police.

[Jochim]

They should consider not brutalising random people if they'd like people to be nicer to them.

[SketchySeaBeast]

How do you know it was "defund the police" and not COVID upending our world?

[antifa]

> "defund the police" [...] "din't mean it that way."

That was definitely a confusing time when multiple people meaning different things were using this slogan.

> Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. [...] Now that crime has risen in the past couple years

This probably looks like a "gotcha" to the average person not paying attention, but AFAIK not a single police department was defunded. In fact many had budget increases, including political support from President Biden himself.

The implication that somebody is backtracking on the slogan because defunding (which never happened) caused a crime surplus is rather hilarious misinformation.

Now deal with the fact that crime and police budgets both went up.