At the national level, the only major thing that the Biden administration can do is via the Justice Department enforcing existing national laws - they have no real role in policing, except national organizations like FBI, ATF, etc. which are largely irrelevant to this. Congress can additionally stop funding transfers of military hardware and stuff like that, but that takes legislative time. And the Justice Dept. can't really start doing stuff until the Senate gets round to confirming an attorney general, which Lindsay Graham is currently blocking.Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 1:39 pmLots of places have already defunded their police forces to invest in social care https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcev ... partments/
But so far it's a grass-roots bottom-up effort (and I've not seen any analysis of the correlation with police union membership/strength). I don't see the current administration doing much to improve social care in communities, and so far all their police 'reform' proposals are just more of the same treading-lightly three-training-course-on-how-not-to-execute-black-people-but-no-consequences-if-you-do time-wasting that's been such a roaring success (for US racists). But that's because they're not interested in doing anything, not because they couldn't take on the unions if they needed to.
Most of the defund the police action has to be at state or local levels, and that's going to look more like the grassroots efforts you are talking about. The MA effort was bouncing back and forth between the R governor and the D legislature last I head. The Boston city effort was going more strongly, but the mayor is in the process of being confirmed as Biden's Secretary of Labor.