Or police are actively making the cities worse places to live as a way of punishing people with these attitudes.
I guess we'll find out when departments slip up and put into writing policies that were previously said behind closed doors.
You may want to check into this a bit more. As with anything it's much more complicated than that. For example, have the Seattle "police" been defunded? In late 2020, the Seattle City Council cut less than $10M off the specific police budget, with funds specifically allocated for adding 125 officers. Meanwhile they budgeted $100M MORE for additional community safety initiatives (see https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund...).
Every time there was discussion of anything like "police reform" the past two years in Seattle, the Seattle Times ran an article with a headline like "Seattle City Council defunds police" and you would read the article and find that nothing had even changed, but that the council had just issued a statement of support for the idea of reform.
This is the kind of spin/propaganda that is happening.