DN editorial: Clinton on right track in fighting bias in all forms

OF COURSE, we can't know what Terence Crutcher was thinking as he walked slowly, hands up, to the side of his stalled car, followed by a Tulsa police officer with a gun pointed at him. But it's not hard to imagine that the 40-year-old unarmed black man was carefully trying to prevent what eventually did happen: being shot and left to bleed out on the street.

We do know what two cops were thinking as they circled above in a helicopter.

"This guy is still walking and following commands," says one.

"Time for a Taser, I think," says a second. "That looks like a bad dude, too."

We also know what Rakeiya Scott was thinking last week as Charlotte, N.C., police approached her husband Keith as he sat in his car. Her cellphone video recorded her pleading with the police not to shoot her husband. In vain.

The deaths of Crutcher and Scott are the latest chapters in a narrative that African Americans know well and that, thanks to video, many white Americans are beginning to understand.

"It's just unbearable," Hillary Clinton said last week, "and it needs to be intolerable. And so maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, look, this is not who we are. We've got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias."

That's right. A presidential candidate called out bias in policing. When questioned about it at Monday's debate with Donald Trump, Clinton noted that bias is a problem for everyone.

"Too many of us jump to conclusions about each other," she said. "We need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way?"

And while there are many fine police officers, when they jump to conclusions - for example, that Crutcher looked like a "bad dude" - it can have fatal consequences.

If Clinton's forthright remarks came as a surprise, they shouldn't have. Near the top of her proposals for criminal-justice reform is a plan to commit $1 billion in her first budget to find and fund the best research and training programs to combat bias. She would push to develop national guidelines for the use of force by police and invest in state-of-the-art law enforcement training programs including how to de-escalate situations like the ones captured on video after video over the past few years. She also proposes to offer federal matching funds to make body cameras available to all police departments. Obviously, cameras don't prevent all shootings, but they do make it more likely that we can know whether their actions were justified.

The Republican candidate's response? Reinstitute "stop and frisk" programs - that is, restore implicit bias in action. In the cities where such programs have been used - including this one - blacks and Latinos have been stopped disproportionately and without reasonable cause, which is why a federal judge declared New York City's program unconstitutional in 2013.

Clinton's proposals are sure to rile the disturbing number of white Americans who believe that whites suffer as much from discrimination as African Americans. They surely won't transform the broken relations between police and so many communities overnight. But they're a necessary start.