FBI Director James B. Comey took a giant step for law enforcement last week in acknowledging “hard truths” about racial bias infiltrating police agencies across the nation.

The bias isn’t new, said Mr. Comey, a descendant of Irish immigrants to America, who talked about how law enforcement’s biased views of the Irish a century ago are part of the lexicon today for the vehicles police use to transport prisoners, “paddy wagons.”

But law enforcement’s legacy in being “brutally unfair to disfavored groups” — including African-Americans and people of color, he said — must be acknowledged, along with the unconscious racial biases that make the white-majority culture “react differently to a white face than a black face.”

Those in law enforcement “must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice,” he said. “We must better understand the people we serve and protect — by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement. We must understand how that young man may see us. We must resist the lazy shortcuts of cynicism and approach him with respect and decency.”

Mr. Comey was lauded in many circles for the frank- ness of his remarks.

However, we, here in Richmond, see the morose irony that shrouds his message. That’s because the FBI director served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Richmond from 1996 to 2002 and headed an aggressive push with Richmond police, state police and federal ATF officials that targeted, rounded up and incarcerated scores of African-American men in the name of reducing homicides in the city.

The program, called Project Exile, was draconian. Anyone arrested with a handgun under the program was denied bond, automatically sentenced to five years in federal prison with no parole if convicted and intentionally shipped off to a federal penitentiary in another state far away from family.

To be fair, Richmond had one of the highest murder rates in the nation at the time. The entire community was seeking solutions to end the bloodshed and violence.

But while the number of murders in Richmond dropped 41 percent in four years after the start of Project Exile, and other violent crimes fell by 22 percent, Mr. Comey’s program had other consequences.

Three federal district court judges said at the time that Project Exile was having a disproportionate impact on African-Americans who made up 55 percent of the city’s population, but were being locked up at a higher rate than white people.

The very program that boosted Mr. Comey’s reputation nationally helped to reinforce the stereotype of black peopleascriminals.Mr.Comey’sProjectExilepromoted the “lazy mental shortcut” that he said police fall prey to working in largely black communities.

In his remarks, Mr. Comey also talked about the “hard truth” of young men of color who “too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison” and become entangled with police because they “grow up in environments lacking role models, adequate education and decent employment.”

Project Exile contributed to that cycle of dysfunction.

Now that the hard truth is out, Mr. Comey, where do you and law enforcement go from here?