I would urge everyone to watch this weekend’s ”60 Minutes” report analyzing the shooting of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man killed by Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby in an incident late last summer. Shelby is about to go on trial for manslaughter, but she took the extraordinary step of walking CBS’s Bill Whitaker through the entire incident, from start to finish.

It makes for sad and gripping television, and I can’t do justice to her description in a short summary here, but the encounter actually began well before the cameras started rolling. In Shelby’s telling, she perceived Crutcher to be high on drugs (PCP was found in his system), he wasn’t obeying her commands, and he was walking back to his car where she feared he had a gun. Here’s a key part of the report:

Shelby says Crutcher kept ignoring her commands, kept walking toward the SUV even though she had drawn her gun, and had ordered him to get on his knees.
Betty Shelby: And he’s not doing it. I’m hollering at him, “Stop. Stop now. And he has now put his hands back up in the air. And he’s looking at his vehicle, back at me.”
Bill Whitaker: And you’re thinking?
Betty Shelby: I’m thinking he’s calculating how he can get to his vehicle to get whatever weapon it is that he’s going to get because he didn’t find it in his pocket.

The other officer on the scene says he perceived the situation was dangerous.

Bill Whitaker: Did you assess the situation as being dangerous?
Tyler Turnbough: Yes. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I don’t know what this guy’s doing. Why is he– why is he walking away from her? What are his intentions? Why doesn’t he just stop?

The next part is sad and chilling:

Betty Shelby: I’m feeling that his intent is to do me harm and I keep thinking, “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Don’t make this happen.” And then right there he’s looking back at me. That’s what we call “targeting.” So he’s getting my position, my last-known location to retrieve and then shoot . . . His shoulders drop, his arm drops, and he’s reaching in. And it’s fast. Just that would tell any officer that that man’s going for a weapon.
Bill Whitaker: You see this on the video?
Betty Shelby: Yes.
Bill Whitaker: That’s what you say is Mr. Crutcher reaching into the car?
Betty Shelby: Yes. I say with a louder, more intense voice, “Stop. Stop! Stop!” and he didn’t. And that’s when I took aim.

There are two questions wrapped up in this incident. The first and more mundane is whether Shelby broke the law. Did she have a “reasonable” belief that deadly force was “necessary to protect [herself] or others from the infliction of serious bodily harm.” Frankly, this is generally a hard case for prosecutors to make. Jurors are understandably reluctant to second-guess split-second decisions made in times of high stress, and this was the first time Shelby had ever discharged her gun in the line of duty. Thus, it will be difficult to assert that she’s a trigger-happy, panicky cop. Shelby’s trial is next month, and while a conviction is certainly possible, she has a far better chance of acquittal than the typical defendant.

The second question, however, is the one that directly bears on social peace and national unity. Would Crutcher still be alive if he was white? On the ‘60 Minutes” report, a local pastor and activist stated with conviction that “race had everything to do with [Shelby] pulling the trigger that day.” He has no evidence to support that deep conviction, yet he still holds it with religious certainty — as do millions of other black (and white) men and women across the land.

And here’s the problem — no one can falsify that belief. Bogus concepts like “implicit bias” make white men and women guilty even without the slightest evidence of racist intention. Indeed, the pastor-activist seems to make that very claim in his indictment of Officer Shelby:

Betty Shelby very likely viewed Terence Crutcher as a “bad dude.” Is she a racist? Does she, you know, have some ill will toward black people? I doubt it. But if she is like so many people in our nation, she assumes too quickly that a black male, especially out on the streets at night, is a threat and not a citizen. Is a suspect and not—a decent human being.

Hence the difficulty in the debate. Absent those rare circumstances where racist intent is obvious and police misjudgment grotesque, we’re left with an officer able to articulate and defend her conduct and a larger community responding with convictions so deeply felt that even daring to question their factual basis is itself seen as evidence that you don’t “get it.”

At the end of the day, cases like Shelby’s illustrate the danger when “social justice” becomes a larger concern than, well, justice itself. Our system can adjudicate claims regarding individual actions. It has a much harder time resolving sweeping, unfalsifiable, and often unsupportable claims of hate, bigotry, or unconscious bias. Officer Shelby will get her day in court, but even if she wins, there are those will never let her clear her name.