When officer Darren Wilson wasn’t indicted for the death of Mike Brown, the one thing well meaning white people always seemed to advocate for was the presence of mandatory body cameras on police officers. What mattered was the objective facts of the case, the logic goes, so we need objective evidence before we can conclude what happened. Only then can we hold police accountable and combat police brutality. It was celebrated when Obama asked for more than 200 million dollars to pay for additional training and body cameras on police officers, as if that could be the solution to the problem.

I’ve been extremely skeptical of this response for a while now, and recent events have confirmed this suspicion. In the aftermath of the death of Eric Garner, a 43 year old father of six, and yesterday’s failure to indict the officer who killed him, we know that cameras aren’t the solution. In clear, harrowing video, we saw a police officer choke Garner, who wasn’t being violent, to death. His last words were “I’m minding my business officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you last time, please just leave me alone. Please. Please do not touch me. Do not touch me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

Here we have a video of an officer killing a nonviolent man. We have a coroner’s report ruling Eric Garner’s death a homicide. We know that chokeholds have been against NYPD protocol for decades. Even that isn’t enough to bring charges to the men responsible, in a grand jury system that isn’t meant to assess guilt, but establish whether there is even a probable cause that a crime occurred. Everyone but police officers seem to clear what is an extremely low bar, especially since the man taking the video of Garner’s death was later indicted.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have videos when black men die. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough facts about how police conduct themselves. How much clearer does it have to be that there’s a more fundamental problem with how our society values black life, with the systems that incentive certain police behaviors, with how the law holds different legal standards for different people.

To advocate for body cameras to fight systemic racial inequality is to propose a simple and easy solution to a difficult and pervasive problem. It’s a bandaid proposed to treat a deep wound, and to take it seriously as a solution necessarily requires seeing the injuries and problems involved as shallow. Implementing body cameras on police officers doesn’t make us uncomfortable, it doesn’t challenge us to think about how we’re complicit in violence, it doesn’t call for us to work towards real solutions or stand with our injured and hurting neighbors.

Limited evidence suggests that body cameras might reduce complaints and how often officers resort to force, and those are reason enough to implement them, but it gives the illusion of fighting racial inequality without actually addressing the underlying issues that makes the criminal justice system such a deadly and dangerous place for black men. It distracts us from the racist housing and banking policies that subsidized the white accumulation of wealth while preventing black families from purchasing houses up through the 60’s and in some areas the 80’s. It distracts us from our racist drug laws and prison system that incarcerate nonviolent offenders and breaks up families. It distracts us from doing any of the real work required in reckoning with and addressing the long history of untreated racial violence in the U.S. Malcolm X famously said:

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.

Today is a good day to reread Ta-Nehisi Coate’s fantastic June cover story in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” Until we understand what the real problems are, and until we stop offering token solutions, we’ll still have a long way to go.