In most of the societies I have lived in or visited, desire to avoid police is strong in the general population. In that sense, what is most atypical about the US isn't the fear and antipathy Black folk feel about the police, but the sense White people have that police are genuinely their allies.

No Soviet person wanted to deal with militia, ever. To be from the Caucasus, however, therefore being what Russians call a "blackass," was to be even more fearful of the police than to be one of the "ordinary" Slavic people living under the boot of the State.

So we have in the US both a particular form of racialized dualism with respect to police, in which US White people are exceptionally pro police—because we have a rich society in which police are only very occasionally corrupt, rule of law is strong so most police are law-abiding most of the time, and there are communities in which police are visible engaged in protecting and serving—and Black folks have unusually strong reasons to be afraid, even as police forces around the society are increasingly integrated and even led by Black chiefs and commissioners. US police use unusually high amounts of lethal force in the street for police in wealthy democracies, overall, and the racial distribution of that use of force is self-evidently biased, as are the sorts of petty abuses of power with which your essay begins.

It is entirely possible to imagine a transition away from paramilitary order-keeping. Most of the time, in most social locales, the form of immediate social response to harm or danger can be unarmed social intervention by people who don't require power to arrest. But that won't eliminate entirely the need for the State's coercive force to deal with violence and criminal behavior, so we can't expect to remove the paramilitary form of government from the urban street altogether. Which means that the question how to secure actual civil equality in the treatment of all people by those forces doesn't vanish if we "defund the police." The most valuable route to improvement of this draft, I think, is to make some further cuts, which you can do, in order to give space in which to come to grips with the residual problem: no matter how far we cut back, the state will have uniforms on the street carrying guns, and we need to have equal justice under law with respect to, and from, them.