The First Issue isn't Crime Numbers or Costs; It's that Black Lives Matter

I love that one of the first "factual" retorts to "defund the police" is "how will we deal with crime?" or "but crime will go up because there will be no one to enforce the law".

This is inherently racist and classist. It assumes that the only way to prevent crime is to deter crime (especially when a lot of calls cops go out to can be situations better dealt with by differently qualified person or strategy, and that a lot of "crimes" are made to increase State revenues and/or outlaw poverty - especially for things like contempt of court for not making it to debtor's court because the person can't get time off from work because they're trying to pay off they debt or don't understand court notices or don't receive notices and/or can't afford an attorney since it's a civil case, not a criminal case - the contempt order makes it criminal, though - and also to get prisoner slave labor for private prisons, which continues the Black Codes and slave economy from yesteryear).

So, just based on what I put in the paranthesis, the first issue shouldn't be how to deal with supposed crime, define what crime is, and to ask how the retorter pictures these criminals. What do these criminals look like? What are the lives of these criminals like? How did they grow up? Why did they become criminals and you didn't? The first issue is seeing all "criminals" as human, no matter is they're truly evil or not, then ask how their path of criminality could have been prevented? What role did society play? 

The biggest issue is people dehumanize, essentialize, and isolate these people from reality in their conceptions of them and society?

The first battles aren't procedure and methods. Nor is it numbers. The first step is to see the humanity in these people that are the "other", and to see that that this is common humanity, and everyone could have led a life such as this provided the right circumstances (though I do leave some room for individual agency, just not pinning everything on that, because it can be easy for survival to be seen as more important than agency). 

Black Lives Matter because many with power, money, isolation, sheltered, and/or complacent because they don't want to be touched by the pain of humanity believe or are able to accept that Black Lives don't Matter. They don't want to listen. They are comfortable and don't want to lose that comfort. 

So no,  the first issue shouldn't be numbers, dollars or crime rates. The first issue should be establishing humanity, that Black Lives/Humanity Matters, and that the people trying to argue numbers first don't believe in the humanity of others, nor do they understand how the structures and systems of our can influence and contribute to the human outcome, no matter the physical characteristics or cultural background of that person (and that only human intervention can change the system).

Black Lives Matter. Black Families Matter.