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There's a name for magical places where police play a limited but vital role

June 10 2020

"I can't breathe." George Floyd's dying words echo around the world in part because we have heard them before. Eric Garner also said them as he was being choked to death by the police in 2014. Garner once worked for New York City Parks and Recreation department, planting trees that cleaned the city's air.

Now, he, Floyd and countless other black people whose lives were unjustly extinguished are inspiring an unprecedented push to transform policing in America, including calls to "defund the police," as the rallying cry goes.

Equitable policing, including science-based measures to reduce violence while increasing accountability of officers, can make us safer. At the same time, this is not just a policing issue. Stories that end with the deaths of black people at the hands of the police start long before an officer cuffs a man's hands or knocks on a woman's door. Our solutions need to start there, too.

Read Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff's full opinion piece on CNN, along with a video clip interview on the case for defunding police