Just after midnight on Aug. 31, two Phoenix police officers stopped a Latino man for a bike light infraction in south Phoenix. The interaction culminated in one officer shooting and killing the man.

The victim, 36-year-old Efrain Hidalgo, was the sixth person killed by Phoenix police this year. A seventh has died since then. Last year, Phoenix officers shot and killed 14 people , an increase from 12 in 2023 and 10 in 2022.

If the circumstances of Hidalgo’s death sound familiar, that might be because a similar bike light stop resulted in the death of Sergio Alvarez last year. Police targeted Alvarez in a pretextual stop, profiling him because he was Latino and supposedly near a known drug house and then using his lack of a bike light as an excuse to detain him. After being tackled b

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