After the police murders of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and so many others, we were told by the Obama administration, local mayors, and police chiefs, “Don’t worry. We see there’s a problem, but we’re going to fix it. We’ve got a set of reforms that are going to make it all better. We’re going to give the police implicit bias training, de-escalation training, mindfulness training. We’re going to hold a series of police-community encounter sessions, where we’re going to talk about racism and apologize for past wrongdoings, and at the end maybe we’ll take a knee together.

“We’re going to give everybody body cameras; we’re going to create some early warning systems to identify those bad apples so that we can weed them out. And then the public will have more trust in the police, so the police can get back to doing the important work that they need to do.”

That is almost exactly what President Obama said earlier this week in his town hall: that we need to go back to those reforms of five years ago, because we didn’t quite do enough of it. We need to get more buy-in; we need to have more police-community encounter sessions, and that will fix policing.