Officers in Europe train for an average of three years, compared to about 19 months for Americans.

“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing.’”

In England and Wales, 2010 police budgets were cut, resulting in 20,592 (14%) fewer officers in 2017, and 20% more gun, knife, and serious violent crimes. The homicide rate also rose 39% from Mar. 2015 and 2019

Police are not trained and were not intended to do many of the jobs they perform. Defunding the police allows experts to step in.

Two 2016 Harvard University studies found that anti-bias techniques meant to fight stereotypes reduced implicit bias for a few hours to a few days, but not longer.

Defunding the police could result in fewer crimes and less violence from police. During several weeks in 2014 and 2015, when New York City police pulled back on “broken windows” policing that focused on actively patrolling for low-level crimes, about 2,100 fewer major crimes were reported, which represents a 3-6% drop in a matter of weeks. If police are not actively patrolling for minor crimes and are responding to fewer major crimes, there are fewer opportunities for violence.

The 2017 Los Angeles city budget, for example, provided 23% of the budget to police, while 9% of Los Angeles county’s budget went to policing. About 97% of police budgets go toward operational costs such as salaries and benefits.

While there are multiple interpretations of “defund the police,” the basic definition is to move funding away from police departments and into community resources such as mental health experts, housing, and social workers. In the larger scope of the civil rights movement, some advocates would reallocate some police funding while keeping police departments, others would combine defunding with other police reforms such as body cameras and bias training, and others see defunding as a small step toward ultimately abolishing police departments and the prison system entirely.