Basic policing is a necessity for a free society, and it's precisely basic policing that the union-aligned left-wing political movements want defunded.
These movements have no problem with their figureheads spending tens of thousands on their own private security attachments [1] or billions of dollars being spent to expand the number of tax enforcers [2] or to bolster policing to protect the political elite. [3]
"defunded" has unfortunately become a catch-all but with actually has a few different interpretations:
At one end of the extreme it can mean that someone actually wants traditional police forces fully disbanded.
At the other end it can mean someone simply wants much more aggressive police reform with funding contingent on that reform.
Somewhere in the middle would be a person who wants some policing money diverted to specializing professional to respond to non-criminal calls, or to respond jointly with police to potentially dangerous calls that might be de-escalated with expert intervention.
People make a mistake when they use "defund" without specifying such details.
