Nice to see you acknowledge context. It’s in short supply in much of the media coverage of white-cop-shoots-unarmed-black-man stories.  

A couple of years ago I attended a parole hearing for a cop killer here in Oregon who beat an officer to death with a piece of wood. The first cop killing I covered as a young reporter in San Bernardino, Calif.,  involved an “unarmed” black man who wrestled a white cop’s gun from him and shot him dead.

How many times have Brown and Martin been referred to as “unarmed?” Being unarmed does not make a person harmless.