Chicago, again, offers a vivid example of how that plays out. The city's deeply segregated black communities have long been subjected to ineffective and sometimes disastrously bad policing. Here are a few police scandals that became national news in just the last two years: there was the district where for decades, residents were routinely tortured and coerced by the police into giving false confessions; the recently discovered practice by which civilians were charged with the deaths of people who were in fact killed by police officers; the high-profile police shooting of Laquan McDonald, which was almost certainly covered up by some officers at the scene. (And as I was writing this essay, several people coincidentally passed this story along to me.) And these controversies all rest against the backdrop of the department's distressingly low clearance rate in homicide cases; police there have only managed to solve about 21 percent of the homicides this year. (For comparison, Washington, D.C, a city rarely held up as a paragon of police effectiveness, had a homicide clearance rate of 62% in 2015.) These are horrifying crimes that devastate communities, and too few people are held responsible. Or, as the late Harvard law professor William Stuntz wrote, "poor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm."