SACRAMENTO — When the news of Stephon Clark’s death broke on March 18, it arrived somewhere between entirely expected and just about unthinkable.

Robert Mann watched the fuzzy images of police standing over the prone body of a black man and thought, “Here it goes again.”

On the other side of Sacramento — where they moved as hopeful teenagers more than three decades ago — Mann’s sister Vern Murphy-Mann felt “an old wound, that hadn’t entirely healed, opened up again.”

Queasiness came with every news report and sidewalk conversation, carrying word that Sacramento police had shot and killed Clark, an unarmed African-American whom they suspected of attempting to break into cars. Just 20 months earlier, the Mann family received similar news about their own brother, also a black man shot to death by members of the same police department. Joseph Mann, 50, carried a knife with a 3½-inch blade.

“The only surprise was that it happened so shortly after what happened to my brother,” said Murphy-Mann, who runs a child care center in Natomas, in Sacramento’s north side. “You would think, OK, you have one high-profile case already and you are talking about transparency and reform and all that you are doing and fixing. But what are you really doing?”

That’s a question that many in this city of just under half a million people are asking following the death of Clark, a father of two toddlers whose violent end has provoked days of protests, blockades of Sacramento Kings games and talk of continuing demonstrations.

City leaders say they have been working for years to improve community and police relations and to minimize the use of force — reforms that gained momentum following the 2016 death of Joseph Mann. The most concrete result: The two officers who fired 20 shots at Clark as he stood in his grandmother’s yard were wearing body cameras. And the city promptly released the official video, something that took more than two months when it came to the dash-cam video in the Mann case.

As in many other cities, complaints about inequitable treatment by the police are nothing new in Sacramento. Long-running reports of racial profiling led the city in 2000 to undertake a comprehensive review of traffic stops. The city formed a police Racial Profiling Commission in 2004 to monitor the problem. But following a report confirming that police officers were twice as likely to pull over black motorists as non-blacks, the commission accomplished little, critics said.

In 2015, the city formed a new panel — the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission — that was filled with community members, rather than police officers. The new commission has the ability to recommend, but not force, changes in “policy, practice or procedure.” The city also created an Office of Public Safety Accountability, with the long-term goal of minimizing the use of deadly force.

“People legitimately have concerns and we as a government entity have to hear our constituents,” said Francine Tournour, the first executive in the accountability post, who pledged to hold hearings in the Clark killing. “The police work for the people. There has to be some room for the people to have a say.”

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A 2016 audit found that the department's sworn police officers were 76 percent white, 10 percent Latino, 3 percent black and 7 percent Asian. The city's population, according to the same audit, is 35 percent white, 27 percent Latino, 13 percent black and 18 percent Asian.

While acknowledging that there is more to do, police officials want credit for what they have already done, pointing to an explorer program that encourages young people of color to become officers, a youth boot camp and 200-member Police Activities League rugby team that won a national championship.

The Sacramento police also point to a “community outreach team” that works with ministers and other leaders to forge closer bonds with communities, as well as outreach meetings by the chief of police. Added Sgt. Vance Chandler, a spokesman: “Our department has been committed to being very transparent. We have a transparency section on our web page so the general public can be aware of our procedures — to show we are an open book.”

But the streets of South Sacramento, where Clark died, are roiling with impatience and calls to action. People don’t oppose more talk, and public hearings, but they insist on something more. This stems from a sense of deep inequity — that the economic boom sweeping some parts of the country has passed them by, leaving too few jobs and a lack of affordable housing.