what improvements made by defunding the police

Did you read my comments and questions on your other thread that you have so far ignored?

The idea behind cutting funding to police is to channel that money to social and educational programs that will result in less crime. Much of the crime is related to poverty and other stressors suffered by the poor in urban areas. If you address the causes of the crime, there will be a reduction of crime and less need for police.

Of course, if ample funding were available for the programs, there would be no need to cut funding to police departments in order to fund them. You could ask your state’s legislators why they aren’t funding those programs if you are interested in decreasing crime in your area.

If you are really interested and will invest some time, this Zoom recording talks all about that and Campaign Zero.

President Obama, Eric Holder, Brittany Packnett Cunningham (cofounder of Campaign Zero) and many others speak in this recording about these issues. This conversation just happened this week, and I can't personally distill it down to bullet points.

A conversation with President Obama: Reimagining Policing in the Wake of Continued Police Violence

You asked about the general movement and now want to debate in the specific.

Which city are you talking about? Since you are reluctant to provide sources to back up your claims, I’d like to research them, please.   

What social programs are there to help the poor get food, housing, clothing, medical treatment, job training, employment, to name a few? One needs to approach multiple aspects of the multi-faceted problems of poverty and generations of oppression.

I can tell you this. For a long time I thought criminals were just purposely breaking laws. However, after being in my job for 25+ years, I can tell you it's not that simple. There are generations of families who are involved in crime because it's what they grew up with and they don't know anything different. There are generations of families who are drug and alcohol abusers, because again, they don't know anything different. There are families where kids grow up in so much upheaval that when things are calm and life is 'normal', they don't know how to act, so they purposely create drama/crime/using so they feel normal again. There are families with ongoing mental health issues who use alcohol/drugs to manage symptoms because they cannot afford medical help. Many families where surviving day to day as a 5 year old is their major struggle and school is not even thought of because there is no adult who cares enough to get them involved. School funding doesn't matter, if the child can't/won't get to school on a regular basis.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So no, the social/school programs we currently have are not nearly enough to support the families that really need it. And I have many many more examples that I could list.

OP you write "the majority of the urban school teachers are POC (college educated)" and I know that is not the case in my local, poor, urban LAUSD high school. Where are you getting your information?

I’ve wondered this as well. Seems that reducing funding would make things worse. Less ability to respond and police would be even more over worked.

FWIW, I don't believe we should get rid of police or underfund them, i just think there should be investment into other programs that may lessen the need for police involvement

Bullshit. Few schools are well funded. If they were well funded we'd have smaller class sizes to allow for more personal connections, we'd have mental health providers in schools full time, we'd have nurses in schools, we'd have a myriad of paths students could choose and we'd have more extracurriculars.

Schools around the country would have art, music, PE and teacher aides.

And maybe we would have time to teach kids how to be people and not just what is on the test.

I think defunding is a stupid idea. Maybe raise the educational requirements, pay better, and better train police officers. Maybe more quality people would actually take an officer position instead of making it only attractive to the dregs of society. There are plenty of other pork to trim the fat and fund the social programs that should be funded.

Yes to all of this. You can throw tens of thousands of dollars at education but if you aren’t addressing all of the other underlying issues happening in the homes of these kids none of it will matter. We can either spend money working on ways to keep people from ending up in jail and on stabilizing families, or we can spend money putting them in jail because we didn’t do anything to prevent it.

ETA: Education is a very important piece of the puzzle but the schools can’t be expected to do it all.

Schools are not well funded.
I work in a very large district that is part inner city and part suburban. We are known for operating within our budget. We have one nurse for every 3-4 schools. Our district (around 35 schools) has two social workers total, and we didn't have any until two years ago. We have guidance counselors in the middle schools and high schools but none in elementary or intermediate school. We have one school psychologist for every 4-5 schools. We don't have near enough people trained in helping at risk children. And we just took a $3,000,000 cut in funding due to Covid-19.

We have roughly 1800 teachers. Very few of them are people of color. It is actually really difficult to get enough POC to work in our district. Teaching isn't exactly a popular job right now, especially in inner city schools.

Grumpy here.  In 2017 wildfires swept through Sonoma and Napa counties.  The fires swept though neighborhoods, not some cute country lanes but actual neighborhoods.  It was during the night.  The Sheriff’s department along with local police had literally minutes to go from house to house to wake people up and tell them to get out.

In 2019 the wildfires were back in Sonoma County this time officials felt that if they couldn’t contain the fire and stop it from jumping the freeway the only thing that would stop it was the ocean and since there was a lot of those cute country roads with a lot of homes on them between the freeway and the ocean officials decided the best course of action was to evacuate 180,000 people which was done quickly and efficiently with again the Sheriffs Department and local police.

This is story that is repeated throughout this country when there is a natural or man made disaster and people need help.  9/11, the 1989 Earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area where part of the Bay Bridge and highways collapsed and so on.  Working beside the Firemen and women were police officers.

There is no question there are big problems in many of our police departments across the country.  But defunding and less police are not the answer.  Reform, more training, and the willingness of police departments and police unions to get rid of the bad apples instead of protecting is the key to fixing the problem.

But hey, if you really believe there should be less police, then I guess you had better send in the social workers to do the jobs the police would do during a wildfire, or earthquake, or flood, or hurricane, or tornado, or a terrorist attack.

Grumpy out.

I also think that people who say we should demilitarize the police really have no idea what daily life is like for police. It seems that ooole are living in a fantasyland of ideals that isn’t realistic at this moment. We need to de-militarize the public before police can be demilitarized. Not to mention that there needs to be resources for dealing with riots and burning of cities, as shown this week. I don’t think that their tactics have been helpful or ideal in some situations, but just leaving the cities with no protection hasn’t been effective, either.

And no, social workers won’t be going to domestic violence calls (some of the most dangerous for police). There aren’t enough social workers, therapists, teachers and others in the helping field. Maybe we should look at why?

There are many systems that could be improved on. But those need to be changed before we can look at reducing police funding, IMO. Maybe if there is less need by changing the rest of the systems, that could be considered in the future. But it can’t be the first response and demand.