Finally, committing traffic enforcement to community residents can create jobs and improve interactions with traffic safety officers.

Targeted changes to Buffalo’s infrastructure will improve traffic safety and decrease reliance on punitive traffic enforcement. The board rebuffs this proposal, arguing that updating road design could take decades. But this has not been the case in other areas. In Amherst, speed-reducing traffic circles installed on Harlem Road and Kensington Avenue have made simple and impactful traffic improvements. Similar approaches could be taken on Buffalo’s most dangerous streets, with near immediate results.

The editorial board’s myopic decry of “defund the police” as a “foolish” slogan exemplifies what Martin Luther King Jr. called “shallow understanding from people of goodwill”: people who say, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods,” and who “paternalistically believe [they] can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

Defunding the police is an exceedingly practical step toward redressing systemic racism and classism. Reallocating funds from a bloated police budget into social programs is sorely needed after decades of failed liberal police reforms and of gutting essential community services that define truly civilized societies.

We do not advocate defunding the police in haste or malice, but because, 52 years after King’s death, police are still empowered to murder, torture and maim Black people with impunity. This is why we advocate for design, and not police.