Last week, when a video surfaced of the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, it was only the latest iteration of a dreadfully frequent occurrence—the Routine Traffic Stop Gone Wrong.
Only some of them make the news. Bystander cell phone videos or dashboard cameras help. Just a few months earlier, elsewhere in South Carolina, a white state trooper stopped a black driver for a seatbelt violation. When the driver reached for his wallet, the trooper thought he was reaching for a gun, and shot him. (The driver recovered from his injuries.)
In relaying stories like this, news reports always note the race of both the officers and the drivers—and they don’t have to make a show of explaining why. The routine traffic stop, like the stop-and-frisk, is heavy with a history of racial tension in America.
[For more of this story, written by Lauren Kirchner, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...affic-stops-persists]
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