This week the White House launched a plan for fixing the broken relationship between law enforcement and minority communities. The move was a response to a spate of killings of black men by white police officers — most notably the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the choking of Eric Garner on Staten Island in New York. Both deaths have triggered civil rights investigations by the Department of Justice.

The problem, as President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have acknowledged, is a national one that extends well beyond the fates of those two men. But if the administration is serious about rebuilding the trust of minority communities in the legal system and police, its current proposals are not enough to help matters much.

Obama’s plan calls for investing $263 million in community policing, of which $75 million will be used to encourage police to employ body cameras. These devices are in vogue as a way to create an objective record of police-citizen encounters and find a way through the tangle of conflicting accounts that inevitably accompanies volatile incidents. Pilot programs show cameras can both curb police misconduct and protect officers against false accusations of abuse.

Much depends, however, on how they are used. Can officers turn them on and off at will? How long will recordings, which may take place in the privacy of homes, be kept? Will recordings be used only for police misconduct cases or if they contain evidence of a crime, or will they provide a backdoor for surveillance and tracking? Who will make sure that police are complying with the rules?

Even if these difficult issues are resolved, the Garner case demonstrates that video recordings are no panacea. A video of his arrest recorded by a passerby shows him being put in a chokehold by a New York City Police Department officer, and the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. But a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict him — symptomatic, many say, of a justice system biased against African-Americans.

The second plank of Obama’s plan takes aim at the militarization of police forces but falls short of meaningful change. Over the summer, images of cops kitted out like commandos sitting atop Bearcat armored trucks in response to protests in Ferguson focused the country’s attention on the militarization of police forces. The White House’s review of federal funding programs concluded that one program alone put 460,000 pieces of military equipment — such as assault rifles and armored mine-resistant vehicles — into the hands of police. Other programs provide federal dollars that can be used to buy equipment that local law enforcement deems necessary, with few constraints.