The “unhelpful” part is that people take the 3-word slogan and assume they know what it means. to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized).

In practice, it is a call for lots of changes in the US legal/policing system and government responses to requests from residents.

The best enumeration I have seen of these policies is CampaignZero[1]. You may not like their policies (they align with lefty prosecutors/DAs like Chesa Boudin), but they exist and there are specific policy proposals.

And cities don’t learn from what police officers do. Most large cities have city attorneys who are required to clean up the lawsuit messes that the police department makes and larger cities have a city manager that insulates the police department from the political side of city government. Neither the city attorney nor the city manager are responsive to voter demands nor do they have the legal authority to tell the police to do anything differently (except during the labor negotiations phase, when they are almost always outmaneuvered by police union negotiators).

[1] https://campaignzero.org/