Do cities like Minneapolis have a plan for what to do with the current cops once the department has been dismantled? I have basically two trains of thought about this:
1. Seems like mass layoffs of people working in the public sector could be economically destabilizing, even if it's deserved. I'm assuming pensions will be grandfathered in, so a lot of these guys will continue to be on the dole for quite some time, but only once they reach retirement. For some that might be soon, but for many, "ex-cop" may start looking pretty unattractive on a resume. What's the next best career for a police officer? What might some of the worst of them gravitate toward so that they can recreate the fraternity? What industry do we need to keep an eye on next to ensure this kind of corruption doesn't bleed through? What will prevent our 'bad apples' from being re-hired into different public capacities so that the racism is still in the system, just more diffuse (and presumably without the authorized use of force, which is huge)?
2. Further to the above, isn't taking a group of hyper-protective, vindictive, violent people like this, and suddenly putting them out of work, an extremely dangerous thing to do? How do we keep these people, whose numbers already contain plenty of overt racists, from further radicalizing once their identities as representatives of the state have been removed? If you cut off state sponsorship of a gang, do you need to worry about that gang retaliating? I'm just taking a guess here, but I would imagine that even if police were defunded nationwide, we'd see a sustained spike in stories of ex-cops killing people extra-judicially for quite some time. Easier to prosecute, maybe (assuming the ripple effect of defunding policing doesn't cripple prosecutors offices in the short term), but still devastating in terms of loss of life. It'd be a real irony if the defunding of police is the thing that ends up leading to gun control measures gaining more popularity, although the opposite will likely happen, this being America. I think I fear that we may trade police for an even more heavily armed citizenry.
None of those are reasons not to do it, and I assume people have already given this some thought, it's just a concept that I'm still wrapping my brain around.