Toward a fairer criminal justice system

It shouldn't matter that Jordan Edwards was a good kid. It shouldn't matter that he got great grades in school. It shouldn't matter that he was well-liked by his peers, his teachers, and his football teammates at his Texas high school.

But the tragedy of Jordan Edwards – a young man, shot in the head by a police officer as he sat in the passenger seat of a car leaving a party that had become dangerous – is all the more wrenching for the way it highlights a truth that is a devastating reality to young black men in America: doing all the right things is not enough to ensure you are safe or will be treated fairly.

Today in America, a great deal of our political discussion revolves around fairness. What is a fair way to structure or economy? To handle those who did not come to America legally? To distribute scarce public resources and benefits?

There is nothing just or fair about what happened to Jordan Edwards. And his story is yet another in a long line of tragedies that now powerfully remind us of the long way we still have to go in creating a fair and just relationship between law enforcement, our criminal justice system, and the public our laws are supposed to protect.

Can law enforcement and criminal justice reform happen during a Trump administration? President Trump rightly points out that law enforcement is mostly made up of good people putting themselves in harm's way to protect us. He lauds the men and women in blue and often talks about the need to make it easier for the cops to do their jobs. Those are defensible positions; what is not defensible is, for instance, that President Trump has no problem continuing to hold that the "Central Park Five" are guiltydespite DNA evidence exonerating them after serving lengthy sentences as wrongly convicted men, or that he wants to make it easier for law enforcement to seize property from those accused of no wrongdoing.