OPINION | Former Police Chief: What is the plan now, United States?

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Editor's Note: Cedric L. Alexander served four decades in law enforcement and other areas of public service. He is a regular contributor to CNN and MSNBC. He is the author of "In Defense of Public Service: How 22 Million Government Workers Will Save our Republic." The opinions expressed in this comment are the author's own. See more at CNNe.com/opinion

(CNN) - I am an American black man who has had the privilege of serving in the police for 40 years. Today, if a young person of color asks me what I should do if a police officer stops his car, I reply: Put your hands on the wheel where they can be seen, cooperate and obey. And if they answered me, as they probably would, Even if I do all that, they are still murdering us, I couldn't tell you anything else. With my decades of experience, I would have nothing to say.

Black Americans - mostly young men, but also women - are being killed by law enforcement officers not for anything they have done, but for who they are. Murders are not accidents, statistical phenomena, or errors of judgment. They are results of American history. Until there is a reform plan to address these flaws in policing - most recently embodied in the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd - I will continue to have nothing to say to young people of color who ask me what to do, how to prevent their own deaths at the hands of the police. And I fear that under President Donald Trump, no plan will ever be drawn, that we will have nothing left but the darkness we find ourselves in now.

The need for a better United States cannot be disputed. Ahmaud Márquez Arbery went running, unarmed, in Glynn County, Georgia, when two local white men, Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory, a former law enforcement officer, were recorded on the cell phone of a third white man, William "Roddie" Bryan, shooting him dead.

Just months later, after a local radio station obtained the video of Bryan's cell phone, posted it on its website and went viral, officials announced that an investigative jury would decide whether to press charges. Just two days later, members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested the McMichaels on charges of aggravated assault and murder. Bryan was arrested on May 21 and also charged with illegal arrest and murder. A judge has not yet asked these men for a guilty plea and their respective attorneys and lawyers have told reporters that they did not commit any crime. A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed that the Civil Rights Division was evaluating the evidence to decide which federal charges are appropriate for a hate crime.

The period in which these events took place, including the delayed absence of charges, extends 74 days. But its true story, the story of violent racism in the US It is much longer, dating from the 19th century and the Jim Crow era in the early 20th century, when lynchings and refusal to prosecute them were routine.

In Louisville, Kentucky, in March, three police officers from the Louisville Metro Department shot and killed Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician working on the front line against covid-19 in her city, at her home. Police officers in civilian clothes and, according to the family, unidentified broke into his home overnight. Taylor's boyfriend opened fire on the men, and the shots were returned. Taylor received the worst part with 8 hits.

In the end it turned out that the order, related to drugs, was linked to two people who were already in police custody. Taylor's only "crime" was having a previous relationship with one of them. The FBI has opened an investigation into his death.

It took seconds to shoot eight times at Breonna Taylor. As with the Arbery murder, the story behind these seconds is much longer and recalls the fate of Fred Hampton, a 21-year-old Chicago activist, Black Panther, and founder of Rainbow Coalition. He was shot dead on December 4, 1969, in a raid on his apartment by agents of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, the Chicago Police and the FBI. The forensic jury ruled justified murder, but the consensus among historians is that Hampton was a target for the FBI, acting in this case as late Nightriders.

On May 25, four Minneapolis police officers, including Derek Chauvin, arrested George Floyd in connection with a "counterfeiting" incident, when he paid a bill with an allegedly counterfeit $ 20 bill. Chauvin pinned Floyd down on one knee, ignoring his repeated pleas for his life ("I can't breathe") and witness statements that the police were killing the man. Chauvin was charged with murder and third-degree involuntary manslaughter.

Floyd's suffocation is proving to be a turning point in the long history of American racism. Videos of police violence against blacks have become commonplace. Most record rapid violent incidents. But the recording of the last minutes of Floyd's life shows a man being deliberately and slowly deprived of the breath of life. It is a lynching.

Floyd's death took place in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, which our president likes to call the "invisible enemy." In contrast, Floyd's murder was intense, obscenely visible, and the response to that visibility has also been intensely visible in dozens of American cities.

Meanwhile, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has essentially abandoned in-depth investigations into unconstitutional police practices, according to a CNN report. During President George W. Bush's first term, the Justice Department launched 12 investigations of law enforcement agencies for practices that violated the Constitution. President Barack Obama's Department of Justice opened 15. The Trump Department of Justice, according to legal experts and Justice Department records, has opened only one. While federal authorities are involved in investigating what happened to Arbery and Taylor, it does not seem likely that any systemic investigation into police practices will take place in any of these locations under the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of video coverage of the peaceful protests, protests, violent riots, and looting that have followed what happened in Minneapolis. What we are missing is a plan to address the events themselves, just as we are missing a plan to address the covid-19 pandemic which, of course, impacts people of color more often and consequences than people white. The virulence of the disease is rooted in the same social and economic conditions as the virulence of the attitudes and policies of the security forces towards communities and individuals of color. Just as we do not have a plan to fight covid, neither do we have a plan to address police violence against this same population. And if Trump's Justice Department record is a barometer of what's to come, we may never have a plan under his leadership.

In 2015, President Obama asked me to join the 21st Century Police Surveillance Task Force, which was a response to a series of serious incidents between law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect. Ours was not a "commission" but a "working group" charged with identifying problems and quickly formulating plans to correct them. In 90 days, through hearings with about 140 witnesses, we formulated 59 recommendations with 92 elements of action in the areas of trust and legitimacy building, policies and supervision, technology and social networks, community surveillance and crime reduction, training and education. , and the welfare of the agents and security. We create a plan, a political, political, strategic, tactical and moral GPS.

Under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the work of the task force and its recommendations were essentially scrapped. It goes without saying that Secretary William Barr has not resurrected them. If someone in the federal government stumbled upon what we did, they'd find a sneak peak of what we need to create now more desperately than we needed it in 2015: a plan, a map, a GPS.

But we are left with none. The consequences of this grave absence should be as obvious to us in 2020 as they were to the writers of the Book of Proverbs millennia ago: "Where there is no vision, people perish ..."

The problems we face at the moment are part of our long history. But the total absence of leadership (political, moral, strategic) seems genuinely unprecedented to me. What is the plan now, United States?

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