Rage in the streets over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has exploded across the country, and leaders at all levels must rise to the occasion and speak to it.

The first priority is to stop the violence and destruction in our cities. No crisis is made better through looting and harming the innocent.

While some have been peaceful, the message of urgency to stop police persecution of African-Americans has been lost amid needless window-smashing and fire-setting.

Let’s not forget, too, that the U.S. is still trying to contain the coronavirus pandemic that has caused so much suffering for months on end. Reducing crowds is in the public-health interest, too.

Once that’s done, state and local leaders must focus aggressively on the problem of police violence against African-Americans. And they must prevent distractions from robbing all of us of that focus.

On the left and right, activists want to assign blame for the riots to socialists or white supremacists. Prosecute those who organized or participated, but don’t go down the rabbit hole of the usual divide.

Other, more well-meaning voices argue that without widespread social reform to tackle economic, educational and housing discrimination, the problem can’t be truly addressed. All of those are real problems that deserve real solutions.

But if we try to fix everything, we’ll fix nothing. Don’t let this moment of opportunity to correct police violence slip away.

Police departments must review hiring, training and recruiting and find ways to weed out potential problems. One of the great frustrations of these crimes is that they reflect upon the vast majority of officers who harm no one and want to truly serve their communities. Let’s help by ensuring the best possible force around them.

States and cities must also address the difficulty of disciplining and prosecuting officers who commit violence. This means taking on police unions, which can be politically powerful, and prosecutors who are reluctant to try officers because it’s tough to persuade a jury to convict. National policymakers have a role to play here, too, as the doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes it tough to hold officers and departments accountable in civil-rights lawsuits.

None of this will be easy. The Floyd killing, the officer’s knee on the man’s neck for eight minutes as he begged for his life, is so egregious that almost no one has risen to defend it. But many police interactions are a judgment call.

In many ways, America feels broken right now. We have three national emergencies layered upon one another: the pandemic, a cratered economy and violence in our cities. And it feels like our national leaders are paralyzed or even egging some of it on for political purposes.

Let’s aggressively dive into the work that must be done so that is no longer the case.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)