system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The Defund-the-Police movement is potentially dangerous and may end up doing more harm than good

A few things to clarify off the bat: (1) I strongly believe that the US has a systemic racism problem, specifically with police and more broadly in our society. (2) There definitely needs to be criminal justice reform in the US. Particularly, the privatized prison system, the "War on Drugs", police militarization, etc. (3) I believe drug use should be de-criminalized, period. 

So now that I've gotten those out of the way, I still believe that the Defund-the-Police movement (as it stands right now) has a lot of major issues that could end up being very dangerous. The first is that I don't believe having a well-resourced police force is an inherently bad thing. Police need funding to solve and prevent crimes. They need manhours, equipment, lab-work and technology - especially for major crimes. Reducing funding for police could have two major negative effects. First it will reduce the police's overall ability to solve major crimes. Second, by reducing funding, there will a natural inclination to shift resources to lower-cost and much less effective forms of police work (e.g. instead of resource intensive major investigative police work, more street level cops busting low-level offenses). This last one in particular could actually exacerbate the issues of police brutality. 

Furthermore, in order to shift police mentality from the militarized and combative force that we have currently to something that actually serves the needs of the community, we need a lot more police training and reprogramming efforts. The current time an average policeman spends in training is laughable. Those programs also require lots of funding. People talk about police needing to be better at things like de-escalation and community engagement. Guess what, that doesn't happen without more training hours being spent on each rank-and-file police.  

CMV

TL'DR. Defunding the police at the moment is dangerous and if anything I think we need more police spending - it should just be spent on different activities within the police force. Taking away funding and pushing it to social welfare programs sounds like a good idea, but it's not going to be for the overall benefit of the public.
gpt
>People talk about police needing to be better at things like de-escalation and community engagement. Guess what, that doesn't happen without more training hours being spent on each rank-and-file police.

One of the ideas is to save money by moving this responsibility away from police entirely. When you have community and mental health professionals responding to minor violations and non-violent incidents, the police can focus on the incidents that actually do need the training and equipment that you mention.

Also, defunding the police is a nebulous term because there isn't a finite goal. But, if you believe that those minor, non-violent incidents are better handled by people other than police, then you might be in alignment with a portion of the defund the police movement.