We've known for decades what it takes to end race riots, we just refuse to do it. A quick thread based on the research for the first chapter of my forthcoming book on policing and prisons. 1/ https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1298663738753658886

During the "long, hot summer of 1967," fifteen years after Brown v. Board and three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, there were 159 so-called race riots across the country, spanning from Watts to Boston and Tampa to Detroit. 2/

This was the year that Miami Police Chief Walter Headley coined the phrase, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Then, as now, police and politicians blamed protesters (and often "outside agitators" or Marxists) for the violence and property destruction. 3/

LBJ convened a Commission to figure out what happened that summer. We now refer to it as the Kerner Commission. It wasn't exactly stacked with left-wingers. 4/

Its conclusion? After a seven-month investigation, the Commission issued a 426-page report blaming the unrest squarely on white racism and recommending "massive and sustained" investment into Black communities. 5/

Calling it "the unfinished business of this nation," the Kerner Report recommended-IN 1967-"programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems." But it also recognized that while generalized racism was the tinder for the unrest, there was one consistent spark: police. 6/

As you all know-that investment never came. But policymakers did listen to Kerner in one way: one the report's seventeen chapters recommended a series of police reforms. Most have been adopted. They didn't work.

We should try the rest of it.

/end