What to do?

We had a Black Lives Matter rally here in town this weekend.

It was a nice event, largely comprised of the same activities as any other community event you'd find in a small Iowan town. A parade down Main Street and people hanging out in the park.

There is no guidebook on how to initiate nationwide reform that resolves centuries of systematic racism. When it doubt, small town Iowans doing what small town Iowans do is as good an idea as any.

I don't think anybody is under the impression that a parade of mostly white people marching down Main Street is going to dramatically impact the national conversation. It won't, but that's not the point. The point is to add our community's voice to the choir, no matter how small a contribution it is.

Such demonstrations can seem like token gestures. These are big, impossibly complex problems. The solution, if such a thing is even possible, is going to be equally elaborate. Nobody knows how to fix our broken system, but if there has been a positive out of the last couple weeks it's that enough political capital may have finally built up to try something.

Congressional Democrats have drafted a police reform bill that would ban chokeholds, reduce no-knock warrants, limit police access to military-grade gear, and create a federal registry for misconduct complaints.

That's a start.

Chokeholds are a target for obvious reasons. Contrary to what movies would have you believe, strangling somebody into unconsciousness isn't as safe for the victim as you might expect.

No-Knock warrants are another police tactic that have proven predictably problematic. In theory, it makes sense that police should be able to arrest potentially dangerous targets before they have an opportunity to respond in force or destroy evidence. In practice, all too often we've seen stories of police bursting unannounced into somebody's home under the flimsiest of pretences and with no knowledge about who is inside, if they're even at the right address, and then get indignant when the residents treat them like common home invaders. And by "get indignant" I mean "arrest or shoot the people that live there."

Limiting access to military gear makes sense as well. A man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail and all that. At the very least, if they are to be given military grade weaponry they should at least have to receive military grade training, discipline, and accountability to go with it.

As for the federal registry, one would hope that would hinder the ability for cops with excessive complaints against them from bouncing around from one law enforcement job to another. I can't say I'm terribly confident that it would work out that way, but it's worth a shot.

Another idea being discussed is ending qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity is another law that sounded good on paper, but hasn't worked out so well in practice. In short, qualified immunity protects police from civil suits so long as the courts determine that the police didn't clearly violate a person's civil rights. The intent is to protect police from frivolous lawsuits and give them some necessary discretion with how they approach an admittedly complicated job.

With that in mind, the Supreme Court, decades ago, ruled that in order to determine whether or not police violated a person's civil rights, there has to be a previous successful civil suit against them.

The Catch-22 here should be obvious. If police are immune from lawsuits outside of cases with a precedent, then new precedents are virtually impossible to establish.

Qualified immunity has long been criticized across the political spectrum, but until now there hasn't been much of a push to actually do anything about it. Libertarian Representative Justin Amash (L-MI) and Democrat Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), in a rare alignment of political sensibilities, have co-signed a bill to end qualified immunity. It will be interesting to see if that goes anywhere.

Then there is the increasingly popular, or unpopular, call to "Defund the police."

The policy is obviously more complicated than a three word slogan, but "Redirect funds from police departments into social programs to reduce the need for police in the first place" is kind of a mouthful.

The underlying idea isn't really new. Some cities have been experimenting with a program that redirects 911 calls about mental health issues to mental health professionals rather than police officers. This is a refreshing reversal from the nationwide trend of eliminating social programs and leaving police to pick-up the slack.

That's one thing that seems to be often lost in the conversation. We've added so many new "hats" to the policing job over the years that it's no surprise problems have arisen as a result. Easing that workload will be better for everybody.

Will any of these ideas work? Nobody knows. It's not even clear if there's enough political will to see them implemented. But hey, they're at least in the conversation.

We're talking about it.

Whatever the solution is, that's how we'll get there.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and knows that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but wouldn't mind if it bent a little faster.