Editor's Note: (Errol Louis is the host of "Inside City Hall," a nightly political show on NY1, a New York all-news channel. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.)
(CNN) With a rarely seen urgency, politicians at every level of government, from coast to coast, are rapidly trying to turn the tumultuous national protests against police brutality -- sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis -- into new laws and policies.
American law enforcement is changing before our very eyes.
It's a great moment but one that should come with a warning label: Not all reforms are equal.
Some proposed changes are basic and necessary, like banning chokeholds, requiring anti-bias training and mandating the use of body-worn cameras. The assumption behind such changes is that cops need more oversight and training to better accomplish an essentially unchanged mission.
A head-spinning number of these procedural laws are being introduced, some -- but not all -- passing with little or no debate.
The Washington DC Council has passed ordinances prohibiting the hiring of police officers with a record of disciplinary problems elsewhere; banned the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants on protesters; and mandated the public release of body-camera footage from cops involved in use-of-force cases.
In Pittsburgh, the City Council is debating legislation that would require police officers to intervene if a colleague uses inappropriate force or deprives a person of their rights; separate bills would ban the purchase of military equipment by the department and put $250,000 into a "Stop the Violence" fund.
Delaware state lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban chokeholds and mandate the use of body-worn cameras and the use of video recordings when juveniles are interrogated.
In North Carolina, the Republican-led upper and lower houses of the Legislature unanimously passed laws -- which had lain dormant since last year -- that reduce mandatory minimum sentencing in drug cases and allow convicted people to expunge their criminal records in some cases.
New York's state legislature is on a tear, passing 10 major reform bills in a single week. The most important was a repeal of a civil service law that had been used to keep police disciplinary records confidential. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has vowed to sign the bill into law, making it possible for the public to know when cops have been found to have abused their authority and/or been sanctioned for improper uses of force.
"Our package will do everything from banning choke holds to making sure that you get proper medical attention when you're in custody to stopping false reporting to 911," state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told me, explicitly crediting the national wave of protests for creating political pressure for passage of reform bills.
"Each of us who have the privilege of serving in public office look for moments like this, where the people are saying, unequivocally, 'We need change. We need to take action,'" she said. "So, as hundreds and thousands, millions worldwide, march for racial justice and for reform in our policing, we had no better moment than this one to act."
Other newly passed New York legislation will allow the state attorney general to investigate alleged misconduct in local police departments and establish a right for bystanders to videotape police activity and keep custody and control of the recordings.
Separately, the city's comptroller and members of the City Council have been calling for cuts that could total $1 billion and are negotiating a final number with Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has agreed to unspecified reductions.
That's where things get even more interesting.
Alongside the new procedural changes, a deeper transformation of policing -- often lumped together under the provocative slogan "Defund the Police" -- is also under consideration. Those proposals involve taking many traditional tasks out of the hands of law enforcement altogether. This thinking recognizes that in many street encounters an officer with a gun isn't needed and only makes matters worse.
The killing of George Floyd, for instance, began with a shopkeeper calling the police because Floyd allegedly tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill. Years earlier in New York City, the squad of cops who swarmed, choked and killed Eric Garner were trying to enforce a local ordinance on selling loose cigarettes.
"Defund the police" is shorthand for the recognition that you don't need a squad of men with guns to deal with a phony $20 bill, or to hassle a man selling loose cigarettes -- that other agencies should handle such low-level enforcement.
It amounts to a repudiation of a generation of asking cops to respond to every conceivable act of community disorder, including some for which they are utterly unsuited.
"The thing that distinguishes police from other parts of government is that they are violence workers. They're who you call when you need the capacity to really put hands on people," says Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of "The End of Policing." "We don't call the sanitation department when we need that. We don't call the education department."
Like most New Yorkers, Vitale is realistic about the need to have trained workers armed and ready to confront violence. "But this is a teeny, tiny percentage of what actual patrol officers do every day," he said. "They're managing noise complaints and parking complaints, dealing with tenant and neighbor complaints, chasing homeless people around and things like that."
But there's a growing sense that New York, like other big cities, should not send cops to deal with people who are homeless or have mental illness, or children acting out in school or on street corners. Money will instead go to public and private agencies that deal with housing, mental health, job training, youth recreation and the like.
"The question is, why did we use criminalization as the mechanism for addressing those concerns?" Vitale says. "Why didn't we create the kinds of community infrastructure so that kids don't need to hang out on the corner? So that homeless people are not sleeping in the park, or squeegeeing people's windows?"
That is the biggest question the nation is asking. We're about to see a wave of local experiments that will show whether America can start using the police only when the threat -- or reality -- of deadly force is truly needed.