On the culture wars beat, the story of the week was the New York Times editorial board continuing to defend its hiring of a 30-year Asian-American woman with a history of trolling police officers on social media. And men. White people, too.

“[I]t’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” Sarah Jeong wrote on Twitter. She also tweeted “#CancelWhitePeople.” In 2014 and 2015, she tweeted, “kill more men” and “kill all the men” in separate posts.

Jeong’s antipathy for law enforcement, invariably punctuated with vulgarities, was on display as well. “If we’re talking big sweeping bans on [stuff] that kills people, why don’t we ever ever ever ever talk about banning the police?” she tweeted in 2016.

Are there limits to this kind of thing, or is that just where society is heading? On Thursday, one Internet bully was apprehended after he seemingly solicited murder on Twitter. Brandon Ziobrowski, who’s from the Boston area, offered $500 to anyone willing to kill a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

If you experienced the 1960s, some of this ugliness feels familiar. But here’s the rub: It’s not wrong to question the police — or the FBI, for that matter, or any government agency, including ICE — about their practices, especially when their actions prove harmful to the people they are sworn to protect. Federal officials noted while announcing Ziobrowski’s arrest that four Massachusetts law enforcement officers have been shot in 2018. That’s sad, and alarming. But many more residents of Massachusetts have been shot by cops this year. How many, exactly, I’m not sure, because no federal agency is required to keep such information.

America’s heightened awareness on this subject was a result of the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, four years ago this month. Although his death galvanized the then-nascent Black Lives Matter movement, much of the original information disseminated about that case proved to be wrong. Michael Brown did not have his hands in the air, as was claimed, he was advancing on the patrolman, and he and a pal had bullied and stolen from a convenience store clerk, prompting the police response.

So this wasn’t the best case to incite the public into protesting police shootings. But other cases kept coming, often viewable on videotape: Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy with a toy air rifle, gunned down by Cleveland cops; Walter Scott, shot five times in the back in 2015 while fleeing a traffic stop in South Carolina; Philando Castile, shot behind the wheel of his car in suburban Minneapolis in 2016 after telling a patrolman — pursuant to the officer’s command — that he had a (legally licensed) gun in the car; Bijan Ghaisar, shot to death near Washington, D.C., by National Park Police in 2017; Stephon Clark, killed this year in his grandmother’s backyard by Sacramento police who mistook his cellphone for a handgun.

Before Ferguson, which is to say, before Black Lives Matter took hold, the Justice Department estimated that about 500 Americans were killed annually in encounters with law enforcement. The accurate figure is almost twice that number, a fact known only because The Washington Post took it upon itself to compile a database. We know something else, too: that police officers are rarely charged criminally in these deaths, even when the victim is unarmed, and that when they are charged, the cops are almost always acquitted by juries.

But even though the racial component provided the spark that gave this issue the attention it deserved, centering the conversation on race has also impeded finding solutions. Why is that so? Well, when social justice warriors like Sarah Jeong conflate the subject of police brutality with animus for whites (and men), they provide an incentive for millions of Americans to ignore the issue — and an excuse for government to duck it.

Of the 1,000 Americans whom the Washington Post reports are killed by police every year, about half of them are white — as many as blacks and Latinos combined. Yes, the figures are disproportionate, but a movement that cares about some victims and not others is a movement more easily ignored. And make no mistake, the government entities called to account on brutality or misfeasance would rather we divide and conquer ourselves than honestly address their own shortcomings.

It took eight months for authorities in Minneapolis to charge officer Mohamed Noor criminally after he inexplicably fired his gun from a police car, killing the 40-year-old unarmed woman who called 911 because she thought another woman was being assaulted. The charges would have come sooner, prosecutors said, except that some of Noor’s fellow officers followed his lead in refusing to talk to investigators.

State officials in Texas and Minnesota have rebuffed journalists’ efforts to uncover how a white couple could adopt six minority children over the objections of the kids’ relatives — six kids who were killed when one of their adoptive mothers drove the family off a cliff on purpose. And journalists are the only ones looking. Texas and Minnesota officials have sealed the records, citing “privacy” laws.

In Prince Georges County, Md., William Wirt Middle School is essentially run by the notorious MS-13 gang, many parents say. Legal Salvadoran immigrant children assigned to Wirt face a choice: avoid school, join MS-13, or be brutalized by the gang. So how does the school principal respond to this grim reality? She refuses to comment.

Bijan Ghaisar’s death is a case study in government arrogance and unaccountability. On Nov. 17, the 25-year-old accountant was driving to meet his father for dinner. His Jeep was bumped slightly from behind by an Uber driver, who called police when Ghaisar drove away. After a confusing chase in which the Park Police stopped him twice, and rushed the car with their guns drawn, Ghaisar was shot four times in the head and once in the wrist. Although Fairfax County police released video of the shooting, federal authorities have not charged the officers or fired them — or explained, even to the family, why they killed him. The government hasn’t released the officers’ names. The FBI, which is handling the investigation, even refused to meet with the family’s congressman. In frustration, Ghaisar’s family has filed a $25 million lawsuit.

“Everything about this case,” the suit states, “from the chase, to the shooting, to the subsequent treatment of the family, has been cruel.”

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Orange County Register endorsements for the Tuesday, Nov. 3 general election There’s no doubt government officials feel safer in anonymity, especially given the uncivil way liberals and leftists have been assailing them in public places and even their own homes. Last weekend, for instance, Black Lives Matter activists in Sacramento arrived at the wedding venue of one of the police officers who shot Stephon Clark.

“You’re a murderer!” one protester hollered at the officer, who was huddled with his groomsmen. A female heckler added, “I just wonder if you started planning your wedding before you killed Stephon Clark or after?”

It seemed incongruous to some that the woman who voiced that taunt was white and the officer, like Stephon Clark, is black. Believe it or not, that’s progress. It means we’re talking about the right issue — police practices, not race. Meanwhile, we can stipulate that the nature of this protest was ugly, and perhaps counterproductive: The conversation shouldn’t take place at a wedding venue. But it has to take place, and in the open. Police — and all government officials — must answer for what they do.

Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics