It is also beyond dispute that a white officer killed an unarmed black man. Yet we do not yet know nearly enough to conclude or speculate, as a flood of news stories and tweets do, that this shooting was motivated by racial profiling. None of us yet knows if the evidence in this shooting will dictate that we add it to the obscene toll racial profiling takes in America. In many ways, it almost doesn't matter, because the trust that should exist between police officers, white or black, and the communities of color they serve is diminished or entirely absent.
The facts as we know them so far: Resident Alyssa Kinsey told CNN she was on the phone Thursday night when she heard a shot followed by what sounded like "running steps" and a woman's voice calling the police. She soon learned that her next-door neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, had been fatally shot.
We know that Botham Shem Jean was shot in his own apartment, but we do not yet know enough to conclude that he was shot because he was a black man in his own apartment. Yet many of the tweets and the news stories draw the same premature conclusion about the motive behind this young black man's death. Those weighing in so prematurely should take a lesson from Chief Hall, who sought to avoid unfounded conclusions as well as even a hint of bias by turning the investigation over to an outside agency, the Texas Rangers.
Americans have learned to assume that racial profiling pulls the trigger whenever an officer -- white or black -- shoots a person of color. The sooner police agencies are able to credibly persuade the public, especially in minority communities, to change their assumptions, the sooner we can begin to rebuild the trust the police and the people so urgently need.
In the meantime, whatever we learn about the death of Botham Shem Jean, one essential truth will remain: a life, young and promising and loved, was lost.
This is one essential truth about the Dallas shooting
