In an interview with the Guardian about diversity and the NYPD, department commissioner Bill Bratton said something that at first seems baffling in its racism and stupidity: “We have a significant population gap among African American males [in the NYPD] because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them.”

As Americans of color have always known—and as the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice last year made abundantly clear—policing in this country is an unequal enterprise. In a speech yesterday, FBI Director James Comey stopped just short of admitting that American criminal justice is systematically racist, but he came pretty damn close.