This month, Philadelphia transit police officers violently forced a man off a bus for not wearing a mask. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised the maximum fine from $500 to $1,000 for breaking social-distancing protocols, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has deployed Police Department officers to enforce them and make arrests. In Kentucky, judges are ordering people who have tested positive for the coronavirus and have broken quarantine to be fitted with ankle monitors — with the threat of arrest if they leave their homes. In Florida, a judge ruled that people arrested for breaking quarantine can be held without bail.

Punitive responses like these will unfairly burden the black and Latino communities that have already been hit hard by the coronavirus. There are smarter and fairer ways to encourage compliance with social-distancing practices.

Aggressive enforcement risks a replication of patterns we’ve seen before. The war on drugs resulted in black and Latino people arrested at much rates higher than white people for the same low-level offenses. The reliance on law enforcement to address addiction ignored the underlying health, social and economic issues minority communities face and, if anything, exacerbated them. Deploying police officers to enforce social-distancing rules could do the same.

This will be the case even if fines are used instead of arrests. It’s well documented that police departments have targeted black communities with fines — which can quickly result in jail times for lack of payment — as a way of supplementing income for municipalities. Black people are already disproportionately targeted for infractions like jaywalking and loitering.