America Already Knows How to Fix This

[IronLionZion]

Police brutality didn’t begin in the Trump era. But this administration made it worse.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/06/trump-sessions-police/612715/

Police brutality is a decades-long problem, one that predates this administration. But President Trump made it worse, my colleague Adam Serwer argues in a sweeping new piece. He gave the police permission to be brutal.

This administration rolled back Obama-era police reform. In 2017, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s then-attorney general, ended the Justice Department’s oversight of local police departments.

Trump personally holds “few ideological convictions as consistent as his belief in the redemptive power of state violence against religious and ethnic minorities,” Adam argues, recalling the president’s 1989 comments about the Central Park Five—and his continued refusal to acknowledge their innocence—and his travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, among other things.

Meanwhile, America already knows how to fix this. “The nation has studied its racism on a loop for decades,” our politics staff writer Adam Harris points out, citing more than a century’s worth of commissions assembled to address it. Calls to study it anew aren’t helpful—the nation “doesn’t need to diagnose the problem again,” he writes.

“Another commission won’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”

Further reading:

A professor of law, a former deputy chief of police, and a criminology professor offer their blueprint for how to actually fix America’s police.

David A. Graham points out a tension in this week’s protests: The use of force by police can’t pacify protests responding to the use of force by police.

Militarization can escalate already-tense situations, Nick Baumann reports.

Links to detailed plans at the link.

Be wary of anyone who says we need to commission a study or something like that. They may be trying to kick the can down the road and avoid taking action. There are plenty of reforms that can be implemented right now to see how it works.

[crickets]

1. K&R for visibility.