There’s not going to be one avenue to fix it. Multiple things have to happen in several arenas, often simultaneously.

Defunding the police without simultaneously investing in community will lead to more deaths and violence and the resulting riots. It’ll be like Tulsa or LA all over again.

It will be a long slow process. I’ll tell you what I think from observation. I’m not claiming to have all the answers and I’m not an expert in any of this. These are just my observations, thoughts, and other people’s thoughts I agree with. You won’t like all of it.

• End the protest marches. It’s too easy for anarchists and looters to use the marches for their own agenda. Like it or not, it makes BLM look bad and BLM cannot afford to lose the high ground. Note I did not say end the protests. Just end the marches. Get more creative with protesting. I’m a huge fan of performative protests.
• Presidential directive requiring all law enforcement agencies to report all shootings to the federal level. Use that data to go into towns and cities with a special investigative unit starting at the worst precincts. Clean house. Leadership on down. Retrain.
• No internal investigation of police shootings. It must be done by an outside special prosecutor with an independent civilian review after the investigation. No exceptions.
• If you discharge your weapon more than once in a single event, automatic suspension without pay pending investigation. The above apply. No more unloading an entire clip into an unarmed person no matter what they’re doing.
• Bust the police union. I can’t believe I’m speaking against unions because generally I’m very much for them, but they’ve gone too far. It’s just too much, they’re doing more than protecting jobs. They’re protecting murderers. It can’t be allowed to stand.
• When a shooting occurs, drown the whole chain that protects these punks in civil litigation from the officer who shot to their weapon suppliers, their boss, the city, the union, the state, the DOJ, the president. You want to change culture, you have to hold the whole culture accountable. Name them too. Again and again and again. In law suits. Wear them down enough they have to respond. Put pressure on the whole chain.
• Gun control legislation outlawing assault weapons. Buy back program. If you’re caught with one after that, automatic 25 years. No parole and hard labor.
• Crack down on gangs. Communities should do this too, through citizen arrests and civil law suits. You can have someone committed if they’re mentally unstable. There should be something similar for families to get their loved ones out of gangs. See below. Give them no quarter in your communities.
• Crack down on customers (freeze assets) and purveyors (harsh, harsh sentences) of vice.
• Invest in communities starting with addiction treatments, food security, education, and safe communities. UBI for single parents if they agree to work part time upkeeping the community, whatever is needed. They choose the hours as they can work them. Use public domain laws to create urban farms and food centers. Make it park like.
• Free or affordable family planning including counseling, birth control, abortion, and voluntary sterilization for males and females. Reduce family size, you reduce poverty.
• Mental health, life skills, and family engagement centers for every community centered around the black experience to end bad cycles.
• Tax credits to businesses that build in impoverished communities. Need to stabilize these local economies and bring cash back to them.
• This one is hard. Watching many of these clips, it seems that often black people exasperate confrontations with police. Whether it’s from fear, anger, being high, or having a mental crisis, or a combination, it adds to the mix and death is the result. I’m not saying the onus is on black people because that fear didn’t just pop up and there’s a long history there. But once other measures are taken to reduce police killings, respond in kind by working on that fear mindset—that you’ll get shot no matter what you do. Don’t let it be a one sided path to healing and change. If you don’t deal with trauma you end up marinating and stewing in it. That’s not good. It causes you to be overly reactionary too. Learn to cooperate during interactions, even if you’re feeling harassed. Maybe reconsider “the talk".
• If police cannot properly handle a tool, it will be taken from them until they prove themselves responsible. This includes many things, but particularly no knock warrants.
• End “shoot first" and “hyper vigilance" training. It’s causing Pre-traumatic Stress Disorder within the police. They should be training to handle things more like Andy Griffith than Jason Bourne.
• Any racist or other biased language or diatribes on social media or found on reviewed tapes from on the job— automatic firing. These people should NOT be police officers or public servants of any kind.
• Legalize marijuana but keep public intoxication illegal and steepen the penalties for it. No exceptions.
• Rehabilitation camps for gang members to break gang indoctrination.
• Credit algorithms need to be changed to penalize dead best parents who withhold supporting income rather than the custodial parent left holding the bills and no way to pay them on time through no fault of their own. A way to measure that income that has been withheld or denied as a reportable business account would do that along with triggering refinancing when income is lost. This is a big reason why single mothers fall into poverty. Income instability. Women need to rethink child support too. It shouldn’t be an after thought, but be contracted before the child is born. If there’s a contract agreement beforehand, you’ll have a better chance of getting support and wage garnishments and liens if need be.
• Grants, vouchers, scholarships, prizes, crowdfunding, donations, public funding, and talent to build back better.

I’ll leave it there. I could go on. I told you you wouldn’t like it. It’s harsh and people are entrenched in their views. Both sides of this issue want the other side to do their cleanup work before they’ll clean their own house. It’ll never get done that way because it’s all interrelated. So it’s going to have to be more like : on the count of three both take a step forward. One. Two. Three. Let it settle. Okay, next step, get ready. One. Two. Three. Let it settle and take a breath. And so forth and so on until we all meet in the middle.

I would start with a national Presidential and Congressional commitment and that executive order. When the President and Presidential staff commit to something, people tend to fall in line. That said, I wouldn’t sit around and wait for it either. You can’t count on the government to save you, you have to help yourself too. In that vein, I would start with food security. I would start building social nets like child care and education around employee owned, not for profit and co-op models.