I can't see how you can demilitarise police in USA without restricting access to deadly weapons across the board. Who's going to enforce the law if the citizenry have access to disproportionately greater force than the police do.
USA needs to start with rule of law, as the current administration, at least, has subverted that you've no chance to move forward IMO.
One more important issue here is that police have been trained only to use force to execute their duties. An alternative would be for cops to focus on de-escalating conflict.
Another more important issue here is that police forces are used to handle problems that are better served by smaller, more specialized agencies. Psychologists and Psychiatrists for mentally ill people. Social workers for the homeless.
A third issue here that is more important than access to excessive force is the rampant and catastrophic lack of oversight for cops. Protests went on for days before George Floyd's murderer was arrested. If video hadn't made the news that man would still be policing today. George Floyd's death didn't involve a gun, it involved a cop who didn't expect consequences.
Beyond all that, police agencies have empirically demonstrated that they have significant and deep seated racial bias across the board. Even if that can be fixed the simplest way to stop the bleeding is to reduce the funding and therefore power of the police. Once they show they can uphold the law without a tax of innocent lives they can have their funding back, but TBH at that point I doubt they'll need it.
Is there a net benefit of coddling unreasonable people to such a degree that we're no longer allowing words to have different meanings, and holding integrity through requiring critical thinking to understand language properly? Organizations playing into this are either pandering to the mob and/or aren't grounded in reason. Let's be strong for our brothers and sisters, even if discomfort increases temporarily due to a mob.
Edit to add: it's interesting my top comment was quickly downvoted 3 times right around the time of the above reply, and then my reply here got 3 downvotes quickly too.
Why is your position the one of critical thinking and "understanding language properly" while the people you disagree with want "unreasonable options?"
As the original article shows, what's being asked for is straightforward and simple to do.
There's no mob. No one is getting canceled. We're just changing some terms we use in a software project to be more appropriate.
The phrase "he doth protest too much" comes to mind every time I see comments like the above.
Defunding the police is a simple to understand slogan that covers a lot of possibilities. Plenty of places have abolished their police and rebuilt from the ground up. When people use the slogan that's generally what they mean. Saying they literally expect there to be no police and everything is anarchy is a strawman position no one besides a couple bros in hoodies in seattle actually takes seriously.
