Ironically, if you really wanted to materially reduce the power of police in American municipal politics, your easiest road would be to hit them over stuff like this—their inefficacy You’d call them bad at their jobs and use that to justify cutting their budgets etc; it’s the playbook that’s been used successfully against just about every kind of government worker. We could run the anti-teachers-union playbook, basically, but for cops. But to do that, we’d have to suggest that, in fact, people who go around habitually stabbing and punching their neighbors should be investigated and disciplined by the state. We would have to take public safety seriously as a good which the state is entitled to pursue, and violent behavior as something the state may justly punish. In other words, on the Left, because of subculture/counterculture tendencies that lead us to basically not care about crime at all, and to fundamentally distrust institutions, we can’t wield the most effective, obvious rhetorical strategy against material police/police-union power.