I've done ride alongs when I worked as a journalist. They were boring for the most part except when two separate patrol cars converged to hassle some teens making out in a car in a field and stopped to pick up a white drunk kid and take him home (a trip that probably would have had a different outcome if the kid was Black or Indigenous).
But you keep saying "oh you don't know what police do" so why don't you enlighten us?
Yes.
No, we mean defund the police.
I think it's worth asking why this is such a polarizing slogan. I think the idea that we'd collapse into anarchy without the police is largely a byproduct of decades of nonstop copaganda with a big dash of racism ("if you get rid of the police *those people* will be able to do whatever they want!").
I did one on a warm Friday night. It was few years ago so I don't remember all of it but I do remember two drug deals gone wrong, one involving a knife, hunting for a missing kid found by another car, one domestic dispute resulting in the man going to jail, one incident of chasing down a person who was seen waving a gun out of the window of a car. That was between 8 PM and 2 AM. At that point things had died down enough that the officer I was with could start to enter the notes he had taken during the evening into his computer. so I went home even though the shift didn't end until 7 AM.
Full disclosure:
My son is a 15 year veteran of our local police force. As far as being an uneducated thug, he was an honours student and voted top athlete in high school. Before he became a cop he took two years of criminology and psychology at university and spent four years as a victim services volunteer. Three out of the five officers on his course had degrees. He has been a patrol officer, including bicycle squad, ERT and is now on the drug squad. He spent years on patrol in the city centre and knows many of the street people by name. Last summer when we met him and his two little daughters at a downtown park for ice cream, a couple of them came up to say hi.
I know two officers who have committed suicide, one of them was the best friend of our next door neighbour who mentored him to become a police officer and became a good friend of ours, so yes, I do worry about the impact the job might have on his mental health.
With all due respect, you are full of ****.