Readers of color tell Insider what policing reform should look like. Here's how they reimagine public safety.

• Insider asked readers of color what police reform means to them and about the role of law enforcement.
• Just 18% of Americans said they supported the movement to defund the police in a recent poll.
• Across urban areas in the US, police officers are frequently whiter than their jurisdictions.

At the dinner table, in Congress, and on the force, police reform is a major discussion today. This is the third part of a series on Reimagining Public Safety.

Click here to read the first part, the story of a cop-turned activist.

To read part two on the legislation attempting to make reform a reality, click here .

Any discussion of police reform today usually involves politicians and activists who hammer out ideas and draw up corresponding legislation. Less involved - generally - are the ordinary citizens of this country who encounter and deal with the police on a daily basis.

Insider asked some of our readers of color to tell us what safety means to them and the role they believe law enforcement should have in society.

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Readers were asked to respond to a single question: What would an ideal version of public safety look like to you?

Insider then had follow-up conversations with these readers, asking them to lay out specific functions they wanted to see in law enforcement.

Our readers proposed several ideas, from redefining the institution of policing as a whole to forging stronger relationships between community members and individual officers. Here's a slice of the conversations we had:

Redefining policing

Large chunks of police funding come from the very communities officers are patrolling. Community members pay taxes, as well as any fees and fines set by the police during interactions with officers. Recently, news reports have pointed out that officers also make significant money doing overtime.

In a process called "Collars for dollars," officers often wait until the end of the day to make an arrest because they know it takes time to put together a police report, which can accrue a lot of overtime pay.

I think what [police reform] calls for is a reallocation. 'Reallocate police funding' may be a better war cry. Fae Harris, Ohio

Those kinds of incentives are antithetical to the institution of policing, one reader, Afrika Williams from North Carolina, told Insider, because they go against the dynamic in which citizens financially support officers.

Williams, 49, wants officers to remember they're a "servant of the people." Officers, she added, have to relearn their role in society and figure out community policing strategies that do not exploit public funding loopholes.

The debate to defund the police

Activists also say officers abuse their power. That's where the movement to defund the police comes in.

"When we talk about defunding the police, we're talking about making a major pivot in national priorities," Movement for Black Lives activists wrote on their website. "We need to see a shift from massive spending on police that don't keep us safe to a massive investment in a shared vision of community safety that actually works."

Ideally, activists say, money originally allocated to support police would be redistributed toward hospitals, schools, parks, and other measures designed to build community.

Defund the police is not necessarily the same as "abolish the police," which has its own varied meaning.

While some activists and scholars mean it literally, others use it as a framework to call attention to a radical idea - eliminating police in its entirety - as a political strategy that allows the country to move closer to major reform.

These definitions may have had an unintended effect. Just 18% of Americans in a USA Today/Ipsos poll released in March 2021 said they supported the movement to defund the police. An overwhelming 58% said the opposite.

Some Insider readers, however, stopped short of endorsing the movement, instead rallying behind a fusion of investments in social services and police presence.

"We need social services, no doubt about it," said Greg Raleigh, 54, from Washington, DC. "But social services cannot go down to the back of an ally and stop a drive-by shooting. Social services don't have that skill set to talk somebody down from a hostage situation.

"It's not switching over [from policing to social services]; it's fusing the two together in some kind of way," he added.

Other readers believe the words "defund the police" evoke an inaccurate representation of what the movement stands for.

"That implies that you want to take away funding from public safety," said Fae Harris, 45, from Ohio. "I think what it calls for is a reallocation. 'Reallocate police funding' may be a better war cry."

It's poor marketing, said 56-year-old Californian John, who asked Insider to withhold his last name due to privacy concerns. "It requires more nuance, a more definitive slogan than 'defund the police,'" he said. "But I definitely understand the sentiment."

"Defund the police," however, is much more attention-grabbing than other, perhaps more accurate, slogans like "reallocate police funding," points out Rashawn Ray, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Changing officer mentalities

For Insider readers, it's not enough to rebrand "defund the police." They say officers must also change the way they're interacting with the public, as well as practices within their own departments.

Williams from North Carolina told Insider officers should be required to study critical race theory, a legal theory primarily taught in law schools that examines how the history of racism and discrimination in the United States is embedded in contemporary American institutions, shaping policy and public affairs today.

She isn't alone. An Illinois state lawmaker in April introduced legislation that would mandate substantial critical race theory education for all officers in the state.

"If we want to change the behavior of police, we have to educate them," state Rep. La Shawn Ford said.

Officers in Chicago have blasted Ford's proposal.

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"They're going to get officers killed with this constant nonsense of 'race, race, race,'" said John Catanzara Jr., president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, who's white.

"You're gonna have people so paranoid to do their job they're going to be worried about race more than they're worried about reacting to a threat," Catanzara added.

For people of color vulnerable to the advocacy of majority-white police unions, that's exactly why law enforcement and public officials should recruit officers from within the community, one reader said.

Across urban areas in the United States, police officers are frequently whiter than their jurisdictions. That can lead to bias against people of color and harm community relations.

Having law officials who live in the neighborhood ... creates an air of trust among the citizens. Greg Raleigh, Washington DC

One solution, Raleigh proposed, is to ensure that officers have a stake in a neighborhood and its ongoings.

"Most people live in the neighborhood," Raleigh told Insider. "Most people help clean up the neighborhoods. Most people are involved in local neighborhood community meetings."

"Having law officials who live in the neighborhood engage in that kind of activity creates an air of trust among the citizens, especially adults," he said. "And then it's easier for the adults to approach an officer who lives in the neighborhood."

Months after the murder of unarmed Minneapolis man George Floyd, support for police specifically fell drastically among Americans, down to 48% of respondents in favor.

A year later, the stats aren't that much better. A Gallup poll released in July found that just 33% of respondents said they had "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in American institutions like police.

These solutions, Insider readers believe, might help bridge the gap between ordinary citizens and police officers.

Click here to read the entire, three-part series on "Reimagining Public Safety."