On the contrary, the US spends 2% of every dollar it makes on the police, the highest of any developed country except Russia: https://www.workandmoney.com/s/police-spending-by-country-984701cbc1c340e9

Your average US police officer makes considerably more than your average teacher.

And they do a terrible and incompetent job at it.

Defund the police is a bad slogan. They should be tearing down a lot of corrupt police organizations and rebuilding them from the ground up. They should be jailing a lot of these cops who are basically career criminals, They should be redirecting billions of dollars away from the corrupt, violent and incompetent police, toward mental health services.