Yeah. Personally I suspect that “defund the police” was explicit advocacy for exactly the type of vindictive make-everything-worse solution that it sounds like, and then got retconned afterwards into something much more sensible once (some) people realized how bad the initial idea was as a civic policy.
May I suggest “fix the system” as an alternate solution? It encompasses both the idea of productively addressing the systemic problem in policing, and moving on from there to wider issues in the criminal justice system that at this point I think are actually much bigger unaddressed problems than anything going on on a large scale with frontline police.