One hopes authoritative answers will soon follow. Because for African-Americans, the abiding fear is that this is just the latest installment of a sordid narrative that ties Chavis Carter to Rodney King, beaten nearly to death by police on a street in Los Angeles.

And Abner Louima, sodomized with a stick at a police station in Brooklyn.

 And Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by police while reaching for his wallet in a vestibule in the Bronx. 

And Arthur McDuffie, dying of police-administered skull fractures at a hospital in Miami. 

And Sean Bell in Queens and Oscar Grant in Oakland and Kenneth Chamberlain in White Plains and Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta and Jeffrey Gilbert in suburban Washington and Henry Glover in New Orleans and all the other African-Americans wrongly, disproportionately brutalized and killed over the years by police who seem to equate melanin with the forfeiture of basic human rights.

That pattern of misbehavior degrades a critical tool of effective police work: the public's trust. Which comes back to bite them - and us - when authorities are put in the position, as they have been in Jonesboro, of asking for the benefit of the doubt. 

They must understand that that narrative casts a long shadow. So there is one hell of a lot of doubt.