Columnist Bill Nemitz (“Feeling, more than ever, the weight of a police badge,” April 22) draws on his grandfather’s exemplary example as a Boston police officer, a career he contrasts with “how out of balance the police-citizen relationship has grown.”

We can agree that reform is needed to bring the relationship back in balance, but knee-jerk reactions like “defund the police” are the equivalent of eliminating the police.

The absence of our police force would create a vacuum that – in dark periods of our history – has been filled with self-appointed protectors such as frontier vigilantes and more recent examples, including the Ku Klux Klan and the iron hand in New York City of Tammany Hall, with their counterparts elsewhere.

Americans, long ago, realized that our personal safety and public peace rest in a police force, created by and ultimately responsible to the people. We must rediscover and restore this bond, and quickly, too.