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Leonard Cure, who was exonerated in 2020 after a 2004 conviction for a crime which evidence showed he was miles away from, was shot and killed in a Georgia traffic stop. The current story is that he became belligerent after being told that he was going to be arrested, and after the officer attempted to subdue him with a Taser, attacked and was shot to death.

Unless a video of the incident turns up, it may never be known how things actually went down, which will give would-be pundits breathing room to insert whatever takes they like. Which will likely be of the black-and-white variety. Either the officer was openly misusing their remit to use force, or Mr. Cure was homicidally violent and there was no other choice.

It's tempting to see the truth a lying somewhere between the two extremes, but that presumes that the public discourse around this will be broad enough to actually contain the truth within it. And I'm not sure that it will be. This is going to become a partisan debate, as these things almost always do, and the two camps tend to condense down to simplistic commentaries on how they want to see the United States. Are police officers agents of a deliberately oppressive system, or are they bravely standing up for the populace against people who are actively seeking to promote violence and anarchy? Have America's non- "model minorities" the subjects of discrimination and a system that marginalizes them for the benefit of others, or are they to lazy to work and see crime as the easy way to a life of ease? Because, in a lot of cases, these are the questions that are actually being litigated in the court of public opinion. Mr. Cure and the officer who shot him are merely the canvases that people paint their preconceptions onto.