Chairing the 12-member panel – which is filled with experts from the fields of "law enforcement, diversity, community relations, and conflict resolution," according to the Cambridge PD press release – is Chuck Wexler, executive director of the D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum. Other members: Charles Ramsey, the former D.C. police chief, Terrance Gainer, the U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms; and Aaron David Miller, a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center who has advised six secretaries of state on the conflict in the Middle East, which should help, except that that conflict is still going strong.

"I'm just hoping to make sense of this thing," Wexler tells the Washington Post. "This is one of those cases where everyone has an opinion about it. It's almost like some kind of Rorschach test. People see it and they read into it what they want."

It's all well and good to have a committee meet and noodle around big uncomfortable things. But the panel is going to have to get down lower and dirtier than the press release suggests it will if it's going to come up with anything useful.

Consider the phrasing of one of the questions the panel will take up: "How does the Cambridge Police Department take this event and use it as an opportunity to modify its operational procedures: obtain a better appreciation of the complexities associated with policing in a very complex social setting: gaining a much deeper appreciation of interactive social skills, and so on?"

A better appreciation of the complexities associated with policing in a very complex social setting? You mean, white policing on black "suspects"? Racial profiling? Is that what that means?

Despite U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s willingness to talk about race in America and his pledge to end racial profiling, his Department of Justice hasn’t done much to dismantle Bush-era guidelines on national security; Those guidelines not only promote racial profiling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation but create justification for state and local law enforcement agents to do it too, the ACLU charges.

"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S., impacting the lives of millions of people in the African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, Arab and Muslim communities," Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program and the main author of the report said in a press release. "The U.S. government must take urgent, direct action to rid the nation of the scourge of racial and ethnic profiling and bring this country into conformity with both the Constitution and international human rights obligations."

The ACLU made the charges in a report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. To read the press release or the entire report, click here.