We’ve seen so many frightening images of police in the last few years — faceless, militarized forces advancing on protesters, fires raging in the background. Even routine stops have become scary.

But Dave Chappelle last night — black man Dave Chappelle — said that there’s a different way.

Chappelle currently lives in his hometown, the small Ohio burgh of Yellow Springs. It may sound familiar: this New Year’s Eve, police action there turned violent, and led to one black man being badly beaten.

The incident was a shock to the sleepy, mostly-white town.  Speaking about the event, Chappelle says that on New Year’s Eve, “nobody felt completely right.” And that he and his family left the celebrations early because of how drunk the crowd was.

The incident caused the chief of police to step down, and several officers to resign. This, Chappelle says, leads to an opportunity. Growing up he recalled, everyone knew the town’s police officers, noting that one officer’s sister “was my music teacher,” and “we all knew Officer Banner’s children, we all knew Officer Nichols’ children.”

Chappelle advocated a return to those days, when the community was policed by members of the community. As things stand now, he feels “we’re being policed by what feels like an alien force.”

Yellow Springs, Chappelle said, “has a tremendous opportunity to be a leader in progressive law enforcement.”

It doesn’t seem a particularly radical idea that a community’s police force be made up of its members, but as the Department of Justice found last year, community-based policing isn’t common as one would hope. 

The city council has yet to announce who will permanently replace the police chief that resigned in January, but hopefully Chappelle’s words will carry some weight with them.

Closing his statements, Chappelle said, “This is a golden opportunity … this is an opportunity to show everybody that local politics reigns supreme. We can make our corner of the world a standard.”

Let Yellow Springs be a city on a hill.