In the wake of yet another death of a black man in police custody, the country is asking tough questions about how to address race, policing, and abuse of police power. Here, Stanford Law Professor David Sklansky, a former federal prosecutor who served as special counsel to the independent review panel appointed to investigate Los Angeles Police Department corruption in the wake of the Rodney King case, discusses policy that has worked, current reform proposals from the Democratic Party, and measures that should be implemented quickly to make a difference.

Following is an excerpt from an episode of Stanford Legal, hosted by Stanford Law Professors Pam Karlan and Joseph Bankman, which will air on SiriusXM channel 132 on Saturday, June 13, and be posted to most podcast platforms.

Involving Police in Police Reform

In addition to everything else that’s now part of the dialogue about police, we need to be thinking about how we enlist rank-and-file officers in the job of reimagining public safety and reimagining policing. Because it’s very hard to make any restructuring of policing work without the cooperation and involvement of rank-and-file officers.

Often rank-and-file officers complain that their perspectives are ignored. And they’re usually right. They know a lot about policing and their perspectives are important to listen to.

Police Unions

Police unions have positioned themselves as such stalwart enemies of reform and in most cases have also positioned themselves as stalwart defenders of all officers who are accused of wrongdoing, no matter the circumstances. Not in all cases, but in a lot of cases. Enlisting the cooperation of the rank-and-file police officers without empowering police unions, more than they’re currently empowered, and while addressing the ways in which police unions currently have too much power, is a tricky and difficult thing to accomplish. But I think it’s important as we move forward.

Mental Health and Policing

Police officers believe, correctly, that they have been made the agency that deals with mental health because nobody else has been willing to address the problem. We deinstitutionalized mental health in this country and never created the apparatus for community mental health support that we said we would, and it was left to the police.

Community Policing

It’s important to reestablish the central tenants of community policing, which is that policing is not just the job of the police department. We need to reimagine the police force as public servants who work hand in hand with a community and not against the community—of public servants who listen to the community.

Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s and into the 2000s, community policing became the orthodoxy of police reform in the United States. Everybody was in favor of community policing. Every police department claimed that it was doing community policing and although some police departments just gave lip service to that idea, the fact that they felt it necessary to give lip service to it was a reflection of how broadly the idea of community policing had penetrated American law enforcement. The idea of community policing was that police departments should not see themselves as separate from the community, they should see themselves as part of the community. They should not see themselves as a thin blue line; they should see themselves as partners with other organizations and with members of the community to produce safety and give people the kind of neighborhood security that they want. So the community policing movement did a lot of good. It helped move police departments into a position where many departments became much more open to criticism from the community and became much better at listening to the community and establishing bonds with the community. It helped make police departments more effective at doing their job. It probably helped reduce violence, too. But violence was never taken as one of the movement’s priorities, just as racism was never taken as one of the movement’s principal targets.

Addressing Racism and Violence

Because of the long litany of African Americans and other people of color who have been killed by the police without adequate redress, the issue of violence has to be front and center to regaining any trust by minority communities. And to its credit, the omnibus bill that the Democrats unveiled on June 8 for nationwide police reform takes that threat seriously and does a number of the things that experts have been suggesting for some time.

Proposals for Change

I think we need to take steps to address the scourge of police violence and particularly police violence against members of minority communities. And, as I said, many of the things that are in the Democrats’ bill are important. They call for several things. One is requiring a duty to intervene so that law enforcement officers who see other officers using improper force are required to do something to stop it. It would also require police departments to teach and require de-escalation. Also, mandating a ban on choke holds and other kinds of carotid holds like the kind that killed Eric Garner and George Floyd. And banning no-knock drug warrants and rolling back the militarization of police departments, which is something that the Obama administration started to roll back and the Trump administration made a 180-degree turn on.

Defunding Police Departments

We need to think about which tasks make sense to take out of policing and which tasks should stay inside police departments. We do have some examples of municipalities that have abolished police departments. But what they’ve done, by and large, is substitute with some other kind of police department. And sometimes it’s been a change for the better. Camden, New Jersey, abolished their police department and replaced it with a department with contract service from the county. And by all accounts, it has a much better police department, a much less violent police department, and a much less violent community than it had before.

But it’s difficult for me to imagine what a world would look like that doesn’t involve uniformed officers responding to situations where force might be required. In a society like ours, where guns flow so freely–where, in the United States, we have more guns than people–it’s hard to imagine a force like that that we don’t arm.

Having said all that, you still can operate very differently. Even if you have a force of uniformed officers, even if they have weapons, policing can look different. Community policing demonstrated that in the late 1980s and the 1990s.