If you prevent crime, in turn you reduce the incidents you need to respond to, its a long term gain for a short term loss.
Perhaps you thought I meant just disband everything all in one sweep, I meant do a gradual shift.
Erm so you'd be happy for the police to take longer to respond to life threatening incidents for the next however many months/years in the hope that at some point you'll see a decrease in the number of life threatening incidents that may or may not have anything to do with actual crime?
You seem to be forgetting that a lot of policing is about dealing with life threatening situations that may not have anything to do with crime.
You can't cut traffic units without massively affecting their ability to respond to things like RTA's and their role in helping prevent them by both catching people driving whilst breaking the law drunk/drugged/dangerously, in unsafe vehicles or simply in dangerous situations (break downs on the motorway).
You can't cut vehicle patrols for non motoring units without removing the ability to respond promptly to emergency calls, would you be happy to have a call to someone with a knife take 15 minutes+ for a response by officers who are out of breath having run several miles because the patrol cars (that could have been there in a couple of minutes) were done away with to increase foot patrols?
How about a lost child or someone who is threatening to kill themselves?
At the moment the police forces have been cut pretty much to the bone, there isn't room to do things like community policing on foot as many people want, without massively affecting the ability to response promptly to emergency calls.
This is especially true given that the government has also cut the funding for things like NHS mental health units, so police are dealing with "missing, in danger" calls that may have been prevented much more cheaply by having mental health provisions on call before it became bad enough to require a police response.
To do what you want would at the very least in the short term require an increase in the number of officers to prevent a spike in deaths/injuries that could have been prevented if the police had made it to the call as fast as normal.
Anyway, of the people I know of who are actually LGBT and post on here, so far 100% are against wasting public money on rainbow stickers.
