Restorative justice is a process that allows for direct mediation between victims of violence and police perpetrators. It also allows direct dialogue between families, communities, and police departments. It relies on a much less staggering burden for action than criminal courts—responsibility—and that action generally involves restitution, an admission of guilt or responsibility, and requiring responsible parties to take action to minimize further harm. It also avoids the near-inevitable letdown of communities hoping for verdicts and provides a remedy to the ineffectiveness of using the criminal-justice system to police the police.

In many ways, Baltimore prosecutors are actually pushing criminal justice beyond where it usually goes in exploring police violence. That verdicts are even being discussed in Baltimore is an anomaly. Indictments of police officers accused of misconduct are much rarer than internal investigations or civil proceedings from victims or their families. Police officers are by definition agents of state violence, protected by the aegis of state authority, and as such agents the standard of proof needed even to charge them with a crime is incredibly high. Even vivid video evidence did result in an indictment for McKinney, Texas, Officer Eric Casebolt; a grand jury declined to indict him for pinning a black teenage girl to the ground after a pool party. It was certainly not enough for Cleveland officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, who were not indicted after a video showed Loehmann shooting 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played in the park with a pellet gun.

Lethality is inevitable when police are armed with lethal weapons, trained to act aggressively, and used as a first response to dysfunction—or to random acts of existence by people of color. Widespread lethality is an obvious and foreseeable consequence of widespread policing, and becomes its implicit teleology. Lethality is enabled by broad protections that police are given under criminal law; without them officers would be unable to function in the aggressive way that they do. There are few ways in which police could go far enough beyond the enormous tolerance for violence against poor people and people of color to merit an indictment by whatever standards of law exist. This tolerance for blood is less an unintended consequence of policing than an integral feature of America’s approach to it, and policing provides the foundation for of all the rest of American criminal justice. Using criminal justice to curtail police violence presents a deep paradox.

Police used to do the business of violence surveilled by no one but those they maimed and killed, lawfully or not. That allowed for the spread of anecdotes from people who lived to tell the tale and a strong body of cultural awareness among black and brown people about the tyranny of police. We all knew about “rough rides” and boys who just disappeared after arrests. We all knew about women who had been “felt up” and assaulted or men who’d had guns pointed at their heads for nothing. Baltimore’s black citizens knew intimately the brutality of its department. But that cultural and anecdotal evidence was almost never enough to indict or punish police officers, nor was the testimony of their victims who had survived, pitted as it was against the credibility of officers on the stand.