This whole "defund the police" thing is a really interesting agenda item, because it's just so obvious that people haven't even thought to consider that the police were created to solve a problem (i.e. the problem of the military being required to pacify a population - where they see the foreign population as less relatable and sympathetic when hurt).
If there are no police, that means that security needs to be organized more locally (such as community watches or ethnic gangs), or otherwise for hire in the form of mercenaries. And that's if by "defund" they mean "eliminate funding". If they only mean "decrease funding", you can bet that the police will only enforce laws on groups for which there is relatively little risk for them in terms of lives and resources.
The more violent neighborhoods of the inner cities they probably just won't bother with (which let's be honest is the intent behind it). During the LA riots back in 1992 the Korean business district became heavily armed to protect their neighborhoods from rioting (South Korea's compulsory military service meant a lot of immigrants had military training). But the LA police came and confiscated the arms of people defending shops unless they personally owned the business. I am concerned that's the type of enforcement the police will go with in these huge Democrat cities: enough enforcement to disarm the white population but not enough to put a dent in any type of criminal activity involving those who aren't afraid to use firearms on the police. In the dissident right this is known as
Anarcho-Tyranny.
So that's what the middle class will be doing in these low-policing areas. The elite will be more than able to afford their own private security to protect them. Those too broke to afford private security will need to rely on community cohesion for protection, and that is sorely lacking in neighborhoods of atomized individuals. More ethnically or religiously circumscribed groups will probably fare better under these conditions.
I know prisons themselves are probably in the firing line as well, being only used to arrest people who protest lockdowns, but they can teach us a few things about "law of the jungle". In prisons often people rely on gangs for protection from predation, and many of these are ethnically circumscribed as well. Blacks would join a Black gang, Hispanics a Hispanic gang, and Whites have their gangs also but Whites tend to have the least sense of ethnic identity compared to Blacks and Hispanics. So if the goal of all this anti-racist drama is to reduce discrimination against POC by whites, there is good grounds to believe it may very well cause the opposite by forcing people to think along the lines of ethnic identity purely for self-preservation. It's like the film series The Purge.
The whole idea of emptying out prisons will have a lot of consequences as well if it comes to fruition. You can't eliminate walls or borders. Eliminating walls or border just makes the walls and borders more atomized. For example in a lot of poor neighborhood malls the security teams that stores have search their low-wage retail employees after leaving (low barrier to entry), whereas people in say, high finance (high barrier to entry) may not even be drug tested once a year.
In absence of dialogue with individuals to establish rapport, there's not many ways for you to build trust; under such conditions security cannot be created nor destroyed, just moved around. So one solution was to concentrate the insecurity in our society into prison cells, and do our best to exclude insecurity from coming in our borders (eg, criminal background checks when applying for a job somewhere, or a visa). If you have a violent city, the gated community becomes the border; in its absence every house needs to mind its own security unless you organize with neighbors to create that border. But dissolving this all into a mishmash as the progressives want to do just reduces to overall ambient security of the ENTIRE society. The exception again, are the rich who can afford mercenaries to look after them, while telling the law-abiding decent people they are on their own to struggle with crime in their neighborhoods.
Add to that the enforced isolation from the fear of viruses. Maybe if you agree to do some volunteer work kicking in the face of old ladies who looked at an Antifa Commissar wrong they'd let you go outside...
For what it's worth I do understand the importance of an area being policed by members of that same community. People know where you live and a Sheriff needs to make peace with the locals and stay in rapport and on positive terms. They also have more personal investment in the quality of life of people in that neighborhood as well. It is aligned with Distributist principles of solving a problem (i.e. security) at the lowest level of abstraction possible while still yielding a good result. The absolute lowest level is owning a firearm for protection, which appears to be coming more into vogue after all the footage of riots has hit social media. Myself personally, I still would prefer violence to be administered by professional members of my community according to laws that we the people vote on in free and fair elections
but I didn't create the world I just live in it
.
Another trade-off is that communities may have greater differences between them in terms of the types of laws enforced, and the enforcement priorities. One way around that for a corrupt ruling class would be to transform twitter and other social media into The People's Courthouse, where doxxing an individual would be all one would need to sign their death warrant unless the forthcoming Maoist Struggle Session shows sufficient remorse of conscience for posting a white square on social media. Hopefully the satellites fry before then.
This is ranty, I know, but it feels good to put it all into words rather than keeping it bottled up.