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 by officers, Alvarez allegedly shot one in the leg before being killed by the other, though much about the incident was not captured by police body-worn camera footage…