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The Police is not a paper clip machine. As soon as they consume half of GDP taking more will decrease their funding since they don't produce anything.


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Police shouldn't have incentives to increase revenue.

The police don't set their own budget, if that's how you're imagining things.

They get given money by government, representing the voters.

If the voters think they're happy with less police of course they can drop 100 employees worth of budget. The police can't stop that.


“Reduce police funding” ?

This isn’t like taking a child’s allowance away. Less budget means less police, and less training for those police. Hitting budgets is an easy rebuttal but a poor one.

Police are not funded by Congress...

Police spending was 0.05% of the GDP in 1980, it's 0.25% of the GDP now.

So, somehow were spending more and the opinion is that were spending less.


Cops don't have their budgets systematically cut. Quite the opposite.

Yes, reduce funding so police departments don't turn paramilitary.

In the UK for instance most officers don't even carry guns.


> We don't need less funds

We spend more on our police force than each country in the world spends on its military, except for ourselves and china. We need less funds.


there is sufficient money in policing, how it is being used is another matter

Incompetent police forces that constantly lose multibillion dollar lawsuits over use of force and torture, that already have the budget of of a medium sized country don’t pay for themselves.

Then what are we paying them so much money for? People often fail to realize what a huge proportion of their local budget is eaten by policing.

Big question is does police currently have enough funding for those main tasks? If not defunding them by taking money from them only makes situation even worse.

Or do you actually need more funding to spend on the other stuff? Which could in best case over some years decrease overall costs for society.


Except police have more than enough funding.

Wait, you mean that policing shouldn't be a revenue generating activity? What a radical concept!

Their budgets are still bigger than ever. De-policing hasn't been achieved because most of the goal was to better utilize those resources. Police refusing to do the basics of their job and increasing their budget isn't a point in favor of their positions.

This is the best argument for defunding the police - their budgets have largely stayed flat or even gone up, and they aren't doing their jobs. Why are we paying for it?

> I wonder if we'll see higher civil asset forfeiture by police to make up for the funding loss.

What funding loss? Total spending on police increased in 2021 and 2022 in every major city across the country.


It makes no sense that money police collects goes directly towards funding any government department. It should go into a tax refund pool.
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