We were all watching. We saw it. We knew what was coming. Don't act surprised now. But is there hope?

President Donald Trump spent a majority of his campaign borrowing from Nixon’s playbook— promising to focus on public safety and be extremely tough on crime. “I will be the champion of the inner cities,” he said during a campaign stop. Now that we are well into his presidency, has Trump forgotten about his promises to black people?

Remember when he promised to send the "feds" into Chicago if the Mayor Rahm Emanuel fails to get things under control. His promise to be the “law and order” candidate was not new. In fact, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Jr — and even Bill Clinton relied on the same rhetoric to secure their party’s nomination and eventually clinch the presidency. The seemingly “good” obsession with punishing street crime with punitive measures is rather ironic because of the lack of focus on the structural and socioeconomic changes that not only attribute to the likelihood of crime but the localization, fostering, and pervasiveness of crime in the first place.

Measures made by these types of presidents usually start squarely with the problem and almost always ignore the cause of the problem, thus are met with large failures and more damage: like Reagan’s War on Drugs which has resulted in a prison industrial system that focuses on packing private prisons with black prisoners who double as workers for the profit of the prison owners. The reverberating effects was another phenomenon known as the school to prison pipeline that ensures black and brown students have a fair shot at prison if they really put their minds to it.

But Trump is better than this! He could take actions to end all of this… After all, Nixon was president in 1969— just a year after Martin Luther King was murdered by the FBI— and this is Twenty-Seventeen! We’re past all that, right? Well. Just hear me out here and let us examine a couple of ways that a Trump administration could end police brutality while simultaneously being consistent with the law and order rhetoric of the campaign.

1. Acknowledge the attitudes of Americans that does make policing difficult— and why these attitudes have come to pass.

I think he’s already doing the first half of this one. In fact, Nixon, Raegan, Bush Jr., and Clinton have gotten this part right. They noticed that there is a large anti-police sentiment in the nation and it serves as an impediment for law enforcement to truly preserve law and order. This attitude, for example, causes some black citizens to not cooperate with police investigations and quite alarmingly— it causes some black jurors to be unreasonably skeptical about police testimonies in court (admittedly, for good reason. Think: Officer Mark Fuhrman in O.J. Simpson case) which can lead jurors to not willing to cast a guilty ballot despite overwhelming evidence proving the defendant’s guilt (Think: OJ Simpson himself). This is where Trump and his cohort fall short. They don’t focus on understanding why these attitudes have come to pass, they merely claim officers aren’t respected but fail to somehow that they have to earn back their respect.

Trump must remedy this. As a law and order president, his priority should be improving the effectiveness of police and prosecutions; he needs to give high priority to correcting and deterring the illegitimate racial practices that diminish the reputation of law enforcement. He will have to get out of his comfort zone and use his words to acknowledge past indiscretion by police and encourage us all to move on as a people.

2. Trump has to make sure police officers follow the rules.

This applies to all administrators of law and order, up and down the criminal justice chain. Trump must demand that they follow the authoritative rules that are in place and he should pledge to fervently discipline officers that fail to comply, just as he has threatened everyday citizens. This would set a precedent around precincts across the country that lawlessness by officers will not be tolerated. His administration should also understand and work against something that might be uncomfortable, but true: implicit bias can and does affect all aspects of criminal law. Therefore, that is a point that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should keep in mind.

"Why hasn’t this happened yet?" You may ask. Well, for one, some politicians have used the phrase “law and order” as a code to signal the whites who are still upset with much of the social change that came during the Civil Rights Movement. It can be seen as an anti-black movement aimed to push back these changes. They have used a read-between-the-lines approach to coat largely racist ideology. They don’t really want to end crime, they just want to be perceived as working to end crime.

I’ll use an example. Maintenance of the body as an athlete is very important for their success in their respective sports. If a basketball player sprains her ankle, the treatment of the sprain is just as crucial as learning how to not sprain her ankle again. Thus, the player must understand that how she lands from a jump-shot is just as important as how she lifts.

For a campaign of law and order to exist, the law must not only be applied to the people but equally to the facilitators of law and order. This one’s on you Trump.

Jonathan Abu

Writing since May 2017 · 3 stories contributed