Matt Welch on Rethinking Policing

On December 2, Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the country, went to Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church to announce that the Justice Department would soon "institute rigorous new standards-and robust safeguards-to help end racial profiling, once and for all."

But by focusing on the role of race to the exclusion of other contributing factors in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, writes Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, both the powerless in the streets and the powerful in the suites were letting an important culprit off the hook: power itself.