According to to Washington Post the crime level went down adding 100,000 cops, so does it take a brain surgeon to suggest the crime level will rise with defunding the cops?
It wouldn't let me in unless I subscribed, so I couldn't read the article. The 100,000 police officers only had federal funding for a few years. When that money dried up, places that got these officers either laid them off, or put out a levy to increase property taxes to keep them. I don't have the research on that, but I'm willing to bet the former took place more often than the latter.
If my theory is correct, then when that federal money ran out, crime would have increased again. But it didn't. It kept going down all the way until the Ferguson Effect, and after we got through that, continued to go down again.
There is really no constant there. So what was constant during that time? More and more states adopted a CCW program for their citizens, along with rewriting the laws to protect victims instead of the criminals. Plus we have more cameras everywhere, and many times they are hidden.
IMO, that's what's responsible for our decreasing crime, not temporary police officers. Police are only good after a crime is committed, usually not before. However an armed citizen is capable of stopping a crime, and by some estimates, that happens hundreds of thousands of times a year to over a million.