Another day, another troubling video of police killing an unarmed black man . Or so it seems. But the horrific South Carolina video released Wednesday, in which a cop shot Levar Jones while he was reaching for his license, as he was asked to do — was the first recent case in which the officer was disciplined: not only fired, but charged with assault, appropriately.

Stark video evidence helps account for the difference in the treatment of Jones’s police assailant and the cops who shot Mike Brown in Ferguson, choked Eric Garner in Staten Island and gunned down Ezell Ford in Los Angeles. But what about John Crawford III, the young father shot by police in a Beavercreek, Ohio Walmart holding a toy gun? Newly released video is almost as stark as in the Jones case. It shows the police opened fire on Crawford immediately, even though the gun he held was fake and he wasn’t pointing it at anyone. Yet a grand jury declined to bring charges against the officers involved.

There are two main reasons for that. One, a young white wannabe Marine, 24-year-old Ronald Ritchie, lied to a 911 dispatcher and claimed Crawford was pointing his gun at other shoppers, including children. He would later, in a television interview, make the false claim that Crawford had also aimed the gun at police. Ritchie should clearly be prosecuted.

But another reason the cops weren’t charged is the fact that they did exactly what they were trained to do, from authorities starting with Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine. The Guardian’s Jon Swaine got ahold of a Power Point used to train Beavercreek police officers, just two weeks before they killed Crawford, in what to do when faced with an “active shooter threat.”

It essentially tells them to shoot first – I’m sorry, I mean “engage” first — and ask questions later, as they did in Crawford’s case.

The training manual, “Single Officer Response to Active Shooter Threats: What to do when YOU are first on the scene,” emblazoned with DeWine’s name, boasts of the way police departments have changed their protocols when facing cases like Crawford’s. From 1966 through 1999, the Power Point explains, “patrol officers respond by locating the shooter, containing the suspect, evacuating the area” and “notifying the SWAT team.” That sounds awfully soft on crime.

From there to 2008, the response was a little sharper, but it still emphasized “containment.” Then in 2008, the approach shifted. Suddenly “officers are empowered to engage the active threat upon arrival,” without waiting for backup. It cites FBI studies showing that active shooter event normally last 3-4 minutes, but “average time per kill/injury is 15 seconds.” Clearly, officers have to act fast.