Two Americas get opposite treatment from police

There are two Americas. There’s the America where people can storm a statehouse with long guns, threaten elected officials, scream into the faces of cops and still walk away unscathed. And then there’s the America where citizens can march peacefully, or stand watching from their own front porches, and get sprayed with rubber bullets and paint projectiles.

There’s the America whose citizens can go birding, handle a cellphone in their grandmother’s backyard, lawfully carry a weapon or relax in their own homes with negligible risk. And there’s the America where such banalities can turn deadly.

There’s the America where people refuse to wear cloth masks and the America where people are desperate for gas masks.

There’s the white America, where citizens can expect to be served and protected — and the black America, where they can’t.

We now have daily video evidence of the disparate police treatment of the two Americas, though the divide predates cellphones. Law enforcement’s trigger-happy use of lethal force against minorities, especially black men, dates back centuries. Perhaps it’s easy for Americans to become resigned to its permanency. Such fatalism can elicit indifference from those of us within the served-and-protected America and provokes those outside its confines to lash out.

But this differential treatment is not a fait accompli. It is the result of policy choices. We can make different ones.

Obviously, “no more racism” isn’t a change that can be executed overnight. Especially when racial inequality was built into the nation’s foundations. Systemic racial inequities pervade American life beyond law enforcement and will require systemic change across our economy and culture. That will take decades of work across many generations. But reducing police violence, including the violence that disproportionately kills one race more than others? That is likely to be an easier lift.

Other industrialized countries, after all, have figured out how to have many fewer killings by law enforcement, even in places that struggle with prejudice and discomfort with diversity. In the United States last year, police shot and killed more than 1,000 people; by comparison, across England and Wales, fewer than 100 died in police shootings over the past two decades. When measuring police-caused firearm fatalities in per capita terms, the United States doesn’t look like a developed nation.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Campaign Zero and other organizations have many recommendations. One is demilitarization. Outfit cops with tanks and other weapons of war, and they will use them. Similarly, studies suggest that outcomes are improved by greater community oversight, reduced barriers for reporting police misconduct and other accountability measures.

That includes striking language from police union contracts that shields officers from facing consequences for misconduct. If officers are told they can act with relative impunity, some will.

More important, explicit limits should be placed on the use of lethal force, including bans on chokeholds and other tactics that restrict oxygen or blood flow to the head or neck. Protocols should be established for the very few occasions when force may be deployed. And alternatives to armed police interventions should be used when possible, particularly in confrontations involving mental illness.

Policing can be a difficult, stressful, dangerous job. Officers have proved relatively able to restrain themselves when dealing with difficult, stressful, dangerous situations in one of the Americas. Now the country must force law enforcement to serve and protect the other America with at least as much restraint.