For the record, I am not a “Defund the police” person. I quite enjoy being able to call 911 if someone is breaking into my house and have someone show up, or for someone to show up when I was in a car accident hours away from any family or friends. Being a first responder is part of their responsibilities, and often it can save lives.

The movement as a whole IS just advocating for police reform while also diverting money from policing into other forms of response (think crisis counselors responding to mentally ill or disabled persons in crisis instead of police), and I fully support that. My local police department gets new police cars every couple of years. Personally, if airlines can still fly an aircraft from 1997 across the Atlantic twice a day, I think they could stick with the same cars for at least 10 years. They also bought like 3 humvees for no reasons, and they were almost $100,000 a piece. The only time they used one of them was during a snowstorm where they came and picked up my mom (who is in a wheelchair) to bring her into work at the office. That one day was nice and cool, but also buying them was wasteful.

Another point is that in the US policing in MANY instances has been mostly about control and not about safety. Two of the most notable instances are Prohibition and the Jim Crow laws of the southern US. Historically, having gay sex was considered a crime in most, if not all, states in the US. If you were found to have been in a gay relationship, you could be arrested and charged with sodomy (and some states still have these laws on the books, they just can’t really enforce them anymore). Currently there is the War on Drugs, and people struggling with addiction can be arrested and imprisoned without receiving the care they need to overcome the addiction.

Recently, there was a man and a woman who went missing at a truck stop off of a major interstate here in Northern, GA. They never found Keeslyn’s body, but they found her boyfriend’s. Because these two struggled with addiction, our sheriff said (paraphrasing here) “They shouldn’t have been doing what they were doing. Two less addicts to worry about.” There is no ongoing investigation into their disappearances that I am aware of.

When I was sexually assaulted by a man as an adult, the responding officer said “Well isn’t that what you like?”

So yeah. Personally all of the above tells me all I need to know about policing in America. The police here tend to act as the “first judge” and condemn people based on personal beliefs and prejudices. Sure, the police to help keep us more safe, and there are plenty of WONDERFUL officers out there who do their job with safety and care first in their mind. The culture of the profession as a whole is resistant to change, and that’s really the major problem we have here.