Hey Portland - you might get what you deserve.

[Irreligious Atheist]

Do you dispute my point that the majority of black Americans do not want to defund the police, and that it's mostly white BLM supporters shrieking in the streets demanding that the police lose their funding? You support defunding the police, which means you just told 81 percent of black Americans to shove it and that their opinion is stupid, and not only that, but if they don't agree with you that the police should be defunded, that actually makes these black people racist against themselves. Maybe it even makes them alt-righters. Who knows. I've been called an alt-righter because I don't want to defund the police.

This is not a point I dispute. Unfortunately, the thing is, sometimes people don't know what's actually best for them. Case in point: you ever read a book called What's the Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank? It's about how an entire state can be convinced to vote for politicians whose policies actively opposed their best interests, and how they can become entrenched into this worldview even as it becomes obvious that it's actively hurting them. Of course, in the case of black people supporting the police, the reason is simpler than anything Frank talked about: they simply don't know of the alternatives. Hell, it even took me a while to figure out why, exactly, defunding the police is a good idea (namely, that they're basically a tool that's being used for far more jobs than it was designed to be used for, and not in a good, life-hacky sort of way.)

I agree that social services and mental health and things like that need more funding. You don't necessarily need to take money away from the police to achieve that though. Just give those things more funding.

In some mental health situations, you really do need the police though. I don't think it's really a good idea to put a mental health professional in harms way when someone is having an episode and carrying around a knife in a threatening manner, for example.