First up — law and order are crucial to a peaceful society.
And without enforcement, there is no practical continuance of law and order over time — anarchies of all varieties do not maintain.
No one is disagreeing with that. (Well, except the anarchists, but they’re largely not for the same peace we seek together.)
Rather, if this is a conflict with police leadership whose goal is NOT to “protect and serve” the people, but inflict violence for other goals — the question is, how do you get past the nearly invincible wall of protections they have to maintain their corruption and continuing harm?
Defunding is not being pushed to remove police from society.
It is saying this:
“Reform your motivations, reduce your violence and escalation, serve the people of this nation — or else your entire organization will be increasingly stripped and remade from the ground up.”
And it is saying it with real foundational power, instead of just moral insistence.
It’s the most elegant way to fight police corruption short of just literally reforming the police— we will NOT choose to live without police over time, but if we’re still too Republican-dominated as a nation, we can at least play the Republican game of forcing them to make hard choices for an electoral cycle, and decide if they want to maintain racism and military buildup under the restrictions.
Yes — true reform through legislation would be better. But we do have to work with the police that exist one way or another — even to replace their worst members. That’s what makes threatening their budget as a protest very, very effective exactly where it is needed in terms of decision-making power.
What we learn from this pressure — the changes we see or the opposition in police leadership we see can inform better legislation, to push for better oversight of the police, and better practices to make them less warriors, and more peace officers in a true sense.
If the goal of law and order is a peace that allows society to work — then a law and order that does not promote peace is the worst kind of stagnation, which requires society to focus to fix as quickly as possible.