His wife went inside, weeping. “Stay strong!” the man yelled after her.

The events depicted in the McKinney video are reminiscent of similar episodes in the past few years, in which white people have called police on black people engaged in relatively minor infractions—or no infraction at all—as well as incidents in which encounters between people of color and police officers have deteriorated into violence. Last month, for example, a white woman was filmed calling the police on a black girl who was “illegally” selling water on a San Francisco sidewalk. In another case, in Oakland, a white woman called the police on two black men using a charcoal grill in a technically non-charcoal-grill-area of a park. A black student at Yale was awoken by police after another student called the campus cops on her for taking a nap in a common room . Many officers who use force excessively don’t face consequences: A former South Carolina sheriff’s deputy faced no charges in 2016 for grabbing a black student and dragging her across the floor.

The McKinney incident represents a common quandary in parsing these viral racial flashpoints: When does something hint at a broader societal problem, and when is it just the malicious action of one individual? What I found is that some people here see the incident as an isolated moment of police brutality that had nothing to do with race, while others see it as a symptom of a community riven by deep divides along racial and economic lines.

My parents moved to McKinney, which is about an hour north of Dallas, in the early 2000s in search of cheap real estate, good schools, and proximity to well-paying jobs. McKinney is the kind of place that aggressively believes in the American dream: “Faith is the postage stamp on our prayers!” proclaimed one of the many church signs near my parents’ house on a recent weekend. That vision apparently resonated even with my jaded immigrant father.

We bought the biggest house we’d ever lived in for $139,000. Our neighborhood, like Craig Ranch, was on the west side of Highway 75, which bisects McKinney. The west has long been referred to as the “new” side, the “good” side, and sometimes the “white” side.

Builders have carved up the west side into sylvan subdivisions with names like Hidden Creek and Eldorado Lakes. The west-side neighborhoods are full of tidy lawns and brick homes. To combat the triple-digit heat that engulfs North Texas for much of the summer, they have swimming pools that are accessible only to residents.

On the east side, some homes are new or remodeled, but others are patched with plywood and corrugated metal. Eighty-six percent of the west side was white in 2009, when the city was forced to settle an affordable-housing lawsuit, compared with 49 percent of the east. The lawsuit claimed that all of the town’s public housing and most of the landlords willing to take Section 8 vouchers were on the east side. The east side has vape-supply stores, payday lenders, and bail bondsmen. The west side has a store called Nothing Bundt Cakes.