Where do we go from here?

Any effort to draft a prescription for the racial injustices in our criminal justice system must begin with an acknowledgement that such an attempt — by a Congress, a state Legislature, a city council, a panel of stakeholders or a newspaper editorial board — must be woefully incomplete.

That’s because an effort to uproot one injustice or inequity only tends to unearth another. People are disheartened and infuriated by the death of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes as Floyd, handcuffed and face on the pavement, cried out that he couldn’t breathe. But it’s obvious from the nationwide protests since then that Mr. Floyd’s treatment and death touched an underlying sense of injustice that goes far beyond the Minneapolis police department — indeed, that speaks to inequities far beyond the endemic mistreatment of black Americans by police.

So yes, we can and should put greater restraints on police use of lethal force and potentially deadly methods of submission, as is being talked about in both Congress and the New York state Capitol.

We should have greater transparency when it comes to how complaints against police officers are handled and disciplinary action is imposed — or not imposed — especially here in New York, where state law has long kept police personnel matters secret. We should have as independent a system as possible for investigating and, when appropriate, prosecuting police officers who kill unarmed civilians.

Departments must be empowered to get bad officers off the forces, and do all they can not to hire them in the first place. They should have recruiting programs that attract more minority candidates. They should better screen applicants to weed out those with racist, violent or simply bullying tendencies — people who, as we’ve seen in recent days, only make their able colleagues’ jobs harder by alienating whole swaths of the communities they serve.

But to talk about such reforms raises issues that can’t be left for police departments alone, or their overseers, to solve.

To say there must be more diversity in police ranks is to raise the question of why so many departments struggle, even with the best of intentions, public campaigns, job fairs, and school outreach, to recruit black and other minority candidates. How do we deal with the apparent sense of alienation, suspicion, tension or outright hostility between many minorities and police departments?

Community policing has been one promising answer, but it takes constant work and commitment on both sides. One mishandled incident — like the looting and violence that marred otherwise peaceful protests this past week in Albany, or the use of excessive force by officers in dealing with people simply exercising their freedom of speech and assembly — can set relations back years. This isn’t a once-built bridge, but a whole network of them in need of continual maintenance.

Yet to call for better police-community relations as a solution to crime is to ignore one of the greatest drivers of criminality: poverty. That raises a host of other issues — the historical inequities in opportunity between whites and minorities in America, chronic underfunding of schools in poor minority communities, inadequate levels of support for the working poor, such as child day care, universal pre-k and after-school programs — all of which, even when they are in place, tend to suffer most in tough economic times, just when those least able to do without them need them most. Any discussion of poverty must also include addressing the racial health disparities the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed.

And to talk about lifting people out of poverty is to raise the question: lift them into what? Many low income communities have gone years without major investment, certainly not the kind of investment that throws millions of public dollars and tax breaks at suburban medical office projects, luxury hotels, and other so-called economic development, the sort that tends to mainly make the affluent more comfortable.

To raise all these issues and ideas is, ultimately, to ask: Where are the leaders who would not merely promise such an agenda, as so many politicians do, but who will follow through on those promises? Many of the hundreds of thousands of people protesting on America’s streets are no doubt there not only because of broken promises of equal justice, but broken promises of equal opportunity.

To ask where the leaders are who will not merely promise but will stay committed to those promises after they take office is to put the responsibility back on us all — to shed our governments of those who have not followed through and to elect those who we can count on to try.

For we will not have national healing with a president who sends police and federal agents to forcibly clear peaceful protesters from a public park so he can get to a propaganda photo op, or who calls for sending the military to “dominate” American communities, or whose appointees in the Justice Department roll back voting rights protections. We will not have national healing with people in leadership roles in Congress who support a president espousing such tactics and policies. And we won’t have healing closer to home by filling our legislatures and local governments with those who see criminal justice as a zerosum game, in which if law and order are the winners, the losers are civil rights, equal justice and equal opportunity.

It falls on we the people — the peaceful protesters and those of us who cheer them on — to not just demand that these dreams come true, but make them so.