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People who appreciate and support the police have never needed the police
Imagine, if you will, that I am an AV tech at a college. My job is to help make sure all the professors can teach using the visual aids almost every classroom has; projectors, laptops, etc. pretend it takes me ~10 minutes to completely cross campus
Now pretend that when called; it takes me roughly 70 minutes to respond, do you no other reason than a lack of urgency. I’ve halted class. The problem I’ve been asked to fix is moot because class is over. Learning has been affected
Now pretend that when I do show up, my ability to fix things in any given problem is dropped down to about 2%. 500 calls in a year and I will solve 10 and shrug my shoulders at the rest, as I arrive on scene lazily and with dispassion. This is the police we have today
I am not angry at the police for existing. I would rather like a group of people dedicated to helping me feel safe, and to solve my problems and concerns. But we don’t have that. We have people who are angry, lazy, and dispassionate. We have officers that don’t do their jobs
So why, in this imperfect world of ours, should we as community members see our money, money that seems harder and harder to come by in a pandemic, go towards people not doing the job they’re paid for, people who take said money away from our communities?
Defunding the police is not about sticking it to the man, as much as we would like it to be. It’s about taking money away from people who have been asked to, and failed to provide a service, and applying it towards alternate solutions to our problems
If I hire a handy man to unclog my drain, and he says it can’t be done, I won’t keep hiring handymen until 1 out of 50 gets it right; I’m hiring a plumber next. I don’t know who will fill the roles the police can’t seem to handle, but continuing to hire them is madness
