It's not just about race, it's about power: rethinking policing after the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

On December 2, Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the country, went to Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church to announce that the Justice Department would soon "institute rigorous new standards--and robust safeguards--to help end racial profiling, once and for all."

Neither time nor place was accidental. Ebenezer was the home church of civil rights hero Rev. Martin Luther King. And December 2 was one week after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, opted to not indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Two days after the speech, a Staten Island grand jury would also decline to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choking death of Eric Garner. In both cases, the cops were white, the victims black. Both decisions touched off nationwide protests that were largely about race, with demonstrators consistently making the basic point that "black lives matter."

So in one sense Holder, the country's first African-American attorney general, was simply responding to the Zeitgeist of the moment, much the same way President Barack Obama did a day earlier at a White House summit meeting announcing a new task force to improve the relationship between police and communities of color. "[We need] to begin a process in which we're able to surface honest conversations with law enforcement, community activists, academics, elected officials, the faith community, and try to determine what the problems are and, most importantly, try to come up with concrete solutions that can move the ball forward," the president said.

But by focusing on the role of race to the exclusion of other contributing factors in these cases, both the powerless in the streets and the powerful in the suites were letting an important culprit off the hook: power itself.

Start with the grand jury process that produced both non-indictments. "The system is under the complete control, under the thumb, of prosecutors," Cato Institute Criminal Justice DirectorTim Lynch told CBS News in December. "If they want an indictment they are going to get an indictment. If they don't want an indictment it won't happen."

This is an exact perversion of the grand jury's initial intent, as enshrined in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. "No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury," the provision reads. Grand juries, composed as they are from local citizens outside the...