I should note that protests can cause change but whether that change will be helpful or even enforced is another matter entirely. I'd even argue that the protests may do more damage than good if they are by people who aren't as informed on the topic, or if their solutions are more problematic than the problem itself.
What I'd propose is to be specific to where we're allocating funds to, mainly funding to police training specifically and turning to community-policing and helping intervene the idea that police are members of the community and are apart of the people they interact with regularly to build mutual trust in both parties.
We'll always need police because social workers are overworked and understaffed as it is and it's unlikely they'd be able to tackle some of the cases that officers are required for, and they'd be needed to defuse active situations in ways that a social worker can't.
Also keep in mind that it's incredibly rare for police to be involved with anything that results in death, with the rate being about 1/2,000 Men and 1/33,000 women. (Black men have a rate about 1/1,000, (96 per 100,000) and Asian/Pacific Islanders have a rate of about 9 per 100,000 and 23 per 100,000 respectively. White men and boys have a risk of about 39/100,000) They account for 0.05% of all deaths of men and 0.003% of all women. (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6708348/) Keep in mind that these are the just the pure findings and don't include a breakdown of if those killings were justified or not, or if they involved other intentions such as suicide, pure accidents, or other factors the police could not control for.
Additionally, a 2019 carried out by the Journal of Politics found that whilst blacks were more likely to come into lethal contact with the police, this does not indicate racial bias because of the higher rates of interaction with the police and the black community rather than any implicit or explicit bias in the police themselves. (
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/703541) This study matches findings from an earlier 2018 study from Harvard that has similar findings. (
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf)
Additionally, a PNAS study found that officer race, sex, background, or ethnicity was not an accurate depicted of the likelihood of shooting and it was mostly consistent throughout. (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689929/)
Given this data, the issue is not race-based police shooting but incidents involving police in general which could be solved with better training and more resources, which themselves costs funds and would reduce the effect of police brutality substantially.
The other solution to reduce the issue would be to reduce the poverty rate of the black community so less people turn to crime, which I have repeated multiple times. This is a two-way street, and lower crime rate and more ability to acquire resources would help the black community immensely.
@denim