It isn’t every day; in fact it isn’t every week, that we can find an editorial columnist from any of the syndicated writers that we can actually agree with.

And after reading the headline “What Justice Marshall taught me” there didn’t seem much hope that Thursday’s submission was going to be any different or better.

But wait — midway through the article was a great quote which not only caught our eye but also our attention and agreement. The comments were in relation to local accountability and prevailing norms.

Justice Marshall retold a story about how one head of a local police precinct in New York City handled the issue of the new Miranda warnings the police were starting to use and in particular how it would lessen the abuses being done by the police department.

The head of the police explained how he dealt with the issue on a local basis. “He got all his cops in a big room and said, ‘If I hear that any of you mistreated anyone in New York — beaten him up, knocked him down, violated his civil rights, targeted him because of his race, anything like that — you’re fired. Immediately. On the day.’”

That was much stronger than the Miranda Rights we hear on all the police shows.

Local accountability meant that a strong reprimand and action from the boss would have more impact than any law that had been or would be written.

The article also was succinct in explaining that prevention of police abuse and protection of civil rights would always be evolving and a work in progress.

The other and even stronger quote in the article written by Cass Sunstein was “the goal of a true democracy such as ours is any baby born in the United States, even to the most under-privileged black family in Mississippi, is merely by being born and drawing his first breath in this democracy endowed with the exact same rights as a child born to a Rockefeller.”

Marshall’s closing words, according to Sunstein, were “Of course that isn’t true. Of course it never will be true. But I challenge anybody to tell me that it isn’t the type of goal we should try to get to as fast as we can.”

His words were spoken in the early 1980s or roughly 40 years ago. Have we made any progress? You get to judge that for yourself.

Have we reached an acceptable position on it? No, we have not.

But we can control our local situation and our local community and how we enforce civil rights and accountability. That is within our control and needs to be improved every day.

See something, say something. That applies to so many issues and proper conduct within law enforcement is certainly included.