Addressing systemic racism (or something like it).

I read awhile back about a city - I think it was Baltimore, but it could have been any of a bunch of cities, I'm sure - where the mayor is black and so is the chief of police. As the city had a tight budget (as do many cities these days), they naturally funded the police department in large part from the fines collected from issuing tickets. In order to maintain the needed income stream, the police were given quotas of how many tickets they had to write each day. On slow days when a policeman wasn't writing enough tickets to meet quota, he quickly learned that he could go to the poor part of town (which was predominantly black, as is typical in large cities) and pick up people for any of a bunch of violations, such as jaywalking, loitering, trespassing, and the like. These people weren't rich enough to hire a lawyer to get them off the hook, so the tickets would stand, the money would come in, and the policeman wouldn't get in trouble for not meeting quota.

Though the system resulted in a disproportionate number of blacks getting tickets, I'm not sure if it could be called systemic racism - maybe systemic oppression of poor people would be a better description. Whatever we call it, the system is clearly incentivizing police behavior that results in far too many poor/black people getting tickets. In fact the system depended on there being a certain amount of crime so that the police could write the tickets and generate the income, thus discouraging the police from doing anything that would actually reduce the crime rate and so jeopardize their funding.

It seems then that the police department's income stream should not be dependent upon their writing tickets, and police should be evaluated not on the number of tickets they write but on a reduction in the number of crimes reported by the citizens. This would incentivize good behavior from the police, reduce the pressure on them to write tickets, result in lower crime in the city, attract businesses which would otherwise be fleeing the higher crime rates, create more jobs, reduce the number of poor people, improve the tax base for the city, and make life all around better for black people (and everyone else in the city).

This is easily said, but less easily done, as many of these cities have no other funds with which to pay their police. If Kaepernick and Nike used their social clout to help cash-strapped cities find better ways to fund their police departments and to incentivize their police to really reduce crime levels, I'd jump to support them in any way I could. Whether this would actually be addressing systemic racism or not, it would make life better for blacks and reduce the disparity that is evident in how they are treated (even by other blacks) in many cities.