Many of the people who took umbrage at the public outcry over a St. Louis County grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson—the now-former police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson—cited the endless ambiguities surrounding that incident as evidence that the system had worked as intended.

They can’t make that argument about the killing of Eric Garner because no such ambiguities exist. To their credit, they don’t try. Nevertheless on Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury, empaneled by the Staten Island district attorney, decided not to charge the police officer who put Garner in the chokehold that ended his life.

Even if the Ferguson outcome didn’t strike you as evidence of systemic problems, then Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Garner, getting the same treatment as Wilson should leave you shaken. These are daunting problems. And because they’re daunting, they generate outpourings of unfocused indignation, aimed generally at racial inequities in the criminal justice system and at the culture of impunity in which so many police officers seem to operate. This is natural and important and healthy.

A white man in Garner’s shoes probably would’ve walked away from that confrontation, and the video footage of the incident, taken in plain view of the officers, suggests that even if Pantaleo had been wearing a camera, it wouldn’t have pierced that culture of impunity.

This points to something alarming—that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic keeps stressing and stressing, the problems themselves in some ways just reflect public will.