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Hey I just wanted to say thanks for the lengthy and detailed response, and I don't mean to seem I'm reducing it just to your final paragraph, but articles like these (which I see with reasonable regularity) lead me to believe that the real world applications of the defund movement do tend to be supported by those who are actually doing the work or are adjacent to it.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health-alternative-911
As someone else has already pointed out, in this specific circumstance it seems likely to me they would have sent police anyhow, which is why I think the other important step is to start letting the folks who hire and retain these clearly problematic officers feel some of the heat - whether financially or through civil suit (thanks QI), or other means.
What I do not support is giving more funding to any department without some ironclad limitations on how they can use it and actual consequences for failing to use it in that way. I have lost all faith that any such increase in funds will be used appropriately though, or that any related agreement will actually be enforceable enough to have the desired effect.
As I mentioned elsewhere, we had decades of uncritical support of police from most of the population until cameras started showing up everywhere to let us see what we were supporting. It turns out those decades of mostly uncritical support do not seem to have resulted in the sorts of police we want, so I'm skeptical that any such conditions will be obeyed or enforced.
Just wanted to jump in - I 100% agree with this. The cop should have had the sense just not to tell her to fool with the pot, since it was fine for a couple minutes and they were on their way out anyway. But he did, and then they flipped out and pointed guns at her because they are unsuited to stressful situations, and she lost her fuckin mind with fear (as is understandable) and didn’t react with anything coherent and sensible, still tried to do what they were asking her to do anyway (somehow), and then they shot her anyway because they were in a total twitchy panic.
(She was actually controlling herself fine until they pointed guns and started shouting, for literally no reason at all, and then she started to react with irrational movements and statements as anyone under life threatening stress may be prone to do. And somehow they weren’t prepared for that and interpreted it as this terrifying level of hostility on her part.)
I’m not trying to excuse the cop. Bottom line, however it happened, he’s guilty. Res ipsa loquitur.
Maybe he’s a POS in addition to being a panicky person who doesn’t think ahead, and either one should have disqualified him from being a cop long before it got to this point. But it genuinely didn’t seem to me like he was looking to shoot anybody; he just was fearful and irrational under pressure and this was that one time where when you equip someone like that with deadly force and send them into random situations, something really bad with permanent consequences is gonna happen because of that combination.
I certainly can't argue with your lived experience, but I hope you'll appreciate that from my point of view it's an anecdote, even though I don't doubt your sincerity, nor the accuracy of your statement.
I agree with all of this, but combined with the information in the OP, what we can do, rather than blame that cop for their own mental health struggles (although I do blame a person with those kinds of anger control issues for choosing a career where they need to decide whether to kill people or not), I think there must be, should be, and should always have been actual consequences not only for the cop who pulled the trigger, but for the folks who hired and retained him.
And if the answer is "for this reason or that they didn't have knowledge of all those details" - then THAT problem can be the first one that supposed well meaning police solve if they want to start building some faith that they actually want to solve these problems as badly as us potential targets do.
The post you originally replied to is the closest I've ever come to actually saying it, but although I usually refuse to even get that close, I will distill down a somewhat famous Chris Rock skit to only its punchline. I may not walk around saying ACAB, but I understand.