Its a cold war between the right and left....

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In the USA, we don't even have a "Left." All that we have are normal people and right wing nutjobs.

Do you have an actual "left" in Australia?

The "defund the police" slogan as used by most of its advocates refers to an attempt to stabilise society by transferring some of the money from conventional policing to other initiatives which (it is argued) work better. Granted, there may be a few extremists who would simply zap the entire police force at a stroke, but it's hard to see how they would ever get the power to do that.

Strangely enough, it was the somewhat right-wing Tory government in the UK that cut police funding a few years ago, claiming that there was no correlation between the number of "bobbies on the beat" and crime prevention, and that "you can't arrest the crime problem away." Unfortunately the same Tory government were also cutting public service spending generally, so there was no intention of putting anything else in place of the cops. Their arguments were nothing to do with trying to directly make the country a better place for ordinary people to live in. The Tories had a safe parliamentary majority at the time. Since then they've become rather scared of losing elections, and they've started to return some of the money they took from the cops. Last time I looked, police corruption had become quite an issue, and the gov was vowing to root it out. But we've had inquiries and working parties about such problems for decades now, and nothing seems to have improved.

There are "nut jobs" on BOTH sides of the political divide.

The "defund the police" slogan as used by most of its advocates refers to an attempt to stabilise society by transferring some of the money from conventional policing to other initiatives which (it is argued) work better. Granted, there may be a few extremists who would simply zap the entire police force at a stroke, but it's hard to see how they would ever get the power to do that.

The extremists on the left saw the police force as part of the white privilege system. Hence they wanted to dismantle it.

The "defund the police" slogan as used by most of its advocates refers to an attempt to stabilise society by transferring some of the money from conventional policing to other initiatives which (it is argued) work better.

"Defund the police" is a really awful slogan, IMO. I sure hope they'll eventually come up with a better slogan, like maybe: "Replace the police"? "Re-structure the police"? "Re-envision the police"? The point being that what's needed is more than just a few superficial reforms.