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I don't think I am. I didn't say anything about why the police stopped enforcing the law, and I'm not sure why it matters much whether they do it through inability or through unwillingness or willful disregard or for some other reason. Nor is it obvious that those categories can be easily disambiguated. If a community refuses to cooperate with the police, the police will be less effective. If prosecutors refuse to file charges, or judges and juries refuse to hand down appropriate sentences, the police will be less effective. If mayors or governors order the police to stand down, perhaps because racial tensions create the risk of rioting or other serious violence in response to police action or because policing is percieved as unjust, police will again be less effective. If police feel that they are unsupported or at significant risk from criminal violence or from unfair treatment by the system, or as you say underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, they will be less effective.
Of the above factors, I am extremely skeptical that "underfunded, understaffed and underpaid" accounts for a significant portion of the policing failures we observe currently or historically. Likewise, I am quite skeptical that "unwillingness or willful disregard" is a sufficient explanation. Racism is the standard explanation, but fails to explain why the same patterns persist when both the cops and the civil authority commanding them are themselves black.
Alternatively, desegregation was executed by the authorities because they believed it would result in peace and harmony. When the results were otherwise, they doubled down on ideology rather than admit error or change course. Desegregation was supported by institutional actors, through "blockbusting" for example, because it gave them a way to directly profit from the situation through actions that would be generally perceived as virtuous. It was supported by normal black people because it offered them the promise of a better life, which they wanted desperately. It was supported by black criminals because it gave them a ready supply of victims. It was supported by the police because they were ordered to support it.
I do not see why specific motivations enter the picture. Desegregation was mandated, and when the immediate result was a rapid and uncontrollable increase in black-on-white violent crime, authorities and institutions refused to engage with the actual nature of the problem, but simply continued implementation of the mandate.
From Scott Cummings' Left behind in Rosedale, excerpts here, full book here.
[...]
Whites left because they were being beaten, robbed, raped and murdered at an appalling rate, and no one who mattered was willing or able to do anything about it. They were driven out through unrestrained, lawless violence, which resulted from the deliberate policies of the authorities and powerful social institutions, and which those authorities and institutions did nothing to address or prevent. All of this had an explicitly racial component in both the motives for implementation, the disastrous effects, and the reasons those disastrous effects went unaddressed. How is that not ethnic cleansing?
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