Which doesn't make much sense because we still need people to enforce the law. Would make more sense to have major reform of the entire policing system, including recruitment and training and oversight/accountability.
The problem is, people organizing the protests picked a slogan because of how catchy it was, rather than what they actually wanted to accomplish.
Instead of "defund the police" it should have been "Reduce police budgets, to divert resources to address problems the police are not well suited to, but keep the core of the police to deal with actual law enforcement issues". But that doesn't sound as catchy.
Personally, I would have gone with a slogan like "demilitarize the police". It covers a significant problem within policing, and won't scare off potential middle-class supporters who think "if we defund the police we won't have any cops around to prevent anarchy".
Law enforcement has fundamental problems that sit at its core. "Defund the police" means they don't see this as fixable. I disagree. Police and military have a toxic culture, the training is horribly inadequate in every way minus showing officers how to arrest and not get themselves hurt, the oversight and accountability is corrupt and horribly inadequate.
Under the Trudeau gov our military has thankfully been really pushing to fix harassment (sexual and otherwise). I don't know if at this point it's mostly lip service to just look good and avoid liability or if things are actually really changing, but at the very least it's a good start. There needs to be zero tolerance for bad behaviour against policy, they need to be as tough on that as the se tough guys think they are on everything else.
It really just comes down to forcing people to act professionally, and giving them more skills beyond violence.
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