The proponents of "Defund Police" are at pains to explain that they do not seek a community without a police force. Most say they just want some money to be diverted away from police budgets to social work, education, etc. (What they really want isn't clear, probably even to them.) Defunding is still a dumb idea, but it's a different dumb idea from the one it sounds like it is.

Camden, New Jersey, is being offered as the poster child for radical police reform. There has been a great improvement there in crime rates there. But taking money away from the police force is not the Camden model. Rather, here's what the head of the Camden effort says:

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“As far as the change that has taken place, the number one difference is resources,” Camden County Police Chief Joe Wysocki told TAPinto Camden. “Cops count and police matter, so by almost doubling the amount of officers on the street that has given us a much larger footprint to focus on community engagement and creating a dialogue with residents that has been missing for decades in the city.”

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Turns out the problem was not too many cops, but too few. The STYLE of policing has changed, and everyone credits that rightly with contributing to the reduction in crime. But greater presence per se cannot be discounted either. In any event, one can hardly call the Camden approach "defunding."

Everyone knows that "defunding" is popular because it is punitive, not because it is remedial. It is an exceedingly stupid idea, one only a Democrat can love and a Republican exploit.

The problem of bad cops in black communities is easy to fix, in theory. People FROM the communities must become cops. The role of police reform should be to make that possible. That's done by attracting officers, not by "defunding" the force. Everybody talks about how the Camden force was "disbanded." But the county police replaced the city police. Reform was radical, but the result was more money for police, not less. Sometimes, less is more, but sometimes, more is more.

There is a reason that most police officers do not live in the neighborhoods they police. Loyalties are divided by police work. How do you arrest the kid you grew up with? How do you use necessary force against your best friend's kid? The community must be represented on the force, but it cannot BE the force. But the police can "get to know" the neighborhood, and vice versa.

The Camden model apparently works. That it is being cited by the press but not by the "Defund Police" folks is telling.