Those who are skeptical of the value of reducing the role of police forces in cities -- such as Minneapolis appears just to have done -- really ought to read the work of Patrick Sharkey. I got into this two years ago, and will discuss it a bit...
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
Sharkey studied the role of police in crime rates in his important study Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. It looked at "broken windows" theories and found that having more police on the streets DOES reduce crime. BUT 
...He found that the reduction in crime rate caused by increased street policing is not dependent on the type of policing. It can be cops, or rent-a-cop security services, or community patrols, or (maybe most importantly) even an increase in visible CCTV cameras -- SAME OUTCOME
Cities, watching crime rates drop to historic lows in recent decades, took the wrong lesson -- it was indeed caused by an increase in security, but that security was caused by more street attention and surveillance, a product of higher-population downtowns, not by actual police
Of course, what Sharkey found is what urbanists like Jane Jacobs called the "eyes on the street" phenomenon or Oscar Newman called "defensible space" -- the notion that having an observing presence, even just windows and friendly CCTV cameras, makes life safer
So reducing police scope is an entirely reasonable and documented approach. The fact is that professional police are a VERY expensive way to create security in neighboruhoods, which could be done for far lower wage and pension costs by using tech or less professional patrols
You'd still have police for investigative crime and vehicle control -- we could use more of that! -- but the street-patrol stuff, which creates violent interference with marginalized communities (even when police largely come from those communities) can be replaced at lower cost
Would "community patrols" (which in many real-world communities would be security firms) be less accountable? On paper, yes. But big-city police tend to be extremely un-accountable because of the malign role of police unions - which would be curtailed here
It could also extend to traffic policing, which isn't done enough and doesn't require a highly paid person -- if you put a photo-radar unit on every street and a traffic-light camera at every intersection you can cut pedestrian deaths dramatically by making fines automatic.
(Those technologies also remove racial bias from human policing, which is ABSOLUTELY RIFE in traffic policing)
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/i…
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/i…
How would this work in practice? We don't know what Minneapolis is considering, but Camden NJ is the model -- they entirely disbanded their police force and its union, and started a new one, at lower pay and cost with an entirely different community role
citylab.com/equity/2018/01…
citylab.com/equity/2018/01…
So black activists saying "defund the police" is not empty sloganeering. It's a well-thought-out concept, replacing expensive armed professionals with a built-in bias problem with inexpensive unarmed non-professionals and technology -- for a greater crime-rate reduction
(And since we're talking about Patrick Sharkey's ideas about more effective policing with fewer police, it's worth a look at his feed -- @patrick_sharkey )
