After the riots in Baltimore, and then the sudden, unexpected criminal charges against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake asked the United States Department of Justice to conduct an audit of her police department and make recommendations for reform. "We all know that Baltimore continues to have a fractured relationship between the police and the community," Rawlings-Blake said. "I'm willing to do what it takes to reform my department."

The request for help from Washington, though, amounted to an implicit admission that Rawlings-Blake did not know what that reform should look like. The mayor of Baltimore, like mayors in most cities, appoints the police commissioner, and Rawlings-Blake named the current chief, Anthony Batts, in 2012. The Justice Department often steps in when the political leadership of a city proves unable or unwilling to address problems with the local police; that’s what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, following the death of Michael Brown. But Rawlings-Blake isn’t resistant to scrutiny; to the contrary, she invites it. Her problem is that she appears to have little idea what to do.

Rawlings-Blake’s perplexity may seem peculiar—aren’t mayors supposed to know how to address the problems in their own cities?–but her dilemma may be more understandable than it at first appears. The deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police, beginning with Brown, last August, have brought widespread attention to the issue of race relations in law enforcement. This focus has not generated any real consensus on what would be appropriate solutions. Rather, the current crisis in criminal justice has proved, in significant part, to be a vehicle for the exercise of preëxisting prejudices.

Consider the claim that family breakdown, absent fathers, and lack of parental discipline are to blame for both violence within the black community and conflicts with police. This constellation of issues tends to be cited by conservatives. Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who was caught on video smacking her sixteen-year-old son, who appeared to be joining the rioting, briefly became a folk hero. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post saluted Graham in an editorial: “If hauling your son out of a violent confrontation with police is abuse, we need more abusive parents. In days of yore, everyone would’ve seen Graham’s actions as what they were: old-fashioned discipline.” It is true that children who grow up in intact homes tend to have better chances in life than those who do not. But one can recognize the problem of broken families (Graham is raising six children as a single parent) without endorsing a mother’s attack on her son.

Moreover, conservatives rarely explain how intact families, valuable as they are, can provide jobs in communities like Baltimore, where about thirty-seven per cent of black men are unemployed, compared with ten per cent of white men. Other cities report similar data, and liberals often use it to counter claims that black families are at issue. Conservatives push culture, liberals stress economics, and neither is entirely wrong—or right.

Following Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, community policing emerged as a popular panacea. There is a mismatch in Ferguson between the racial makeup of its police force (overwhelmingly white) and its population (overwhelmingly black). The death of a young black man at the hands of a white officer seemed like a tragic outgrowth of this misalliance. But Freddie Gray died at the hands of a police force that is nearly as integrated as the city of Baltimore, and that is headed by an African-American commissioner. Of the officers charged in his death, three are black and three are white. Again, a police force that looks like the city it patrols is a good idea, but hardly a guarantee of racial peace or skillful law enforcement.

Hillary Clinton contributed to the debate by calling for all police officers to wear body cameras, which would, in theory, resolve ambiguities about encounters with the public. But the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island, at the hands of the New York City Police Department, was captured on video—which did not conclusively resolve the question of whether the police acted unlawfully.

I discovered the limits of admirable attempts to address racial disparities in law enforcement when I went to Milwaukee earlier this year, to look at the innovative work being done by the local district attorney, John Chisholm. (I wrote about Chisholm in the magazine.) After Chisholm took office, in 2007, he allowed a research and policy group to examine the racial implications of his work. They found that he was prosecuting African-Americans more harshly than whites for nonviolent drug offenses. In response, Chisholm adopted policies that sharply restricted criminal prosecution for nonviolent drug offenses; this, of course, did away with most racial disparities in these areas. But violent crime remains concentrated in Milwaukee’s heavily African-American north side, and Chisholm has continued to prosecute those cases, in which both the defendants and the victims are overwhelmingly black. So there has been little change in the over-all ratio of black-to-white prosecutions.

There are other initiatives, too, that governments can undertake to address the deep hostility between African-American communities and police departments. Many have some value. But will any of them make a dramatic difference in the underlying problems? So far, alas, it seems that the answer is no.