Unknown numbers of people first learned about Keith Lamont Scott’s death Tuesday on social media.

Raised voices, indignant profanities and chilling screams — not the calm voices of newscasters — alerted people via Facebook that another African American man had been shot dead by police, this time in Charlotte.

For two years now, since a white officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, tension has been growing over fatal clashes between police and black men. When Keith Scott became yet another name on the list, a nearly unstoppable reaction erupted.

We’ve all seen unrest on TV before, but this time it was just 40 miles away.

I’ll never forget watching news footage of crowds as they hurled water bottles and other objects at police. The spotlight of a helicopter hovering overhead shone on a group of men as they smashed the windows on a police cruiser and jumped on its hood. Another clip showed a young man kicking in a storefront window uptown.

Later some demonstrators said their activities were calm Tuesday night until police showed up in riot gear. But officers appeared to need every bit of protective gear they had. Yes, some people wanted to protest peacefully, but others appeared bent on exploiting tragedy as an excuse to break the law.

With Keith Scott’s killing and the unrest that followed, the feeling has grown stronger than ever that Salisbury needs to ensure this kind of fire never ignites here. But how?

The first answer is always community policing, and it is important. But the anger that exploded in Charlotte was about more than Scott’s killing — more than the string of police shootings, even. It came from deep-seated feelings of frustration and pain that go back for generations.

I don’t pretend to understand those feelings. My experience has been very different. But repeated calls for dialogue tell me that we have to do more. Community meetings held by the city have a preaching-to-the-choir quality. How do we bring in a broader cross-section of people to study the roots of racial distrust and work toward solutions?

Scott is one of at least 707 people — 164 of them black men — who have been fatally shot by police officers this year, according to a Washington Post database tracking police shootings.

For African-Americans, there’s frustration over seeing police use deadly force in incidents that didn’t seem to call for it, to outsiders’ eyes. How is it that a suspected terrorist in New York can be shot four times and survive, but a black man who encounters police in the wrong place at the wrong time — and does not respond to their commands — gets killed?

For law enforcement, there’s the frustration of dealing with the worst problems our society has to offer countless times each day for very little pay, yet seeing the entire profession tainted by high-profile incidents where officers responded in questionable or improper ways — in situations many officers can identify with.

The black community has come to distrust police because of these high-profile killings, and police are on guard because of retaliation and criticism.

Which came first, and which will end first?

Another question: Why didn’t Tulsa, Oklahoma, explode after an officer killed an unarmed black man there, just a few days earlier than the Charlotte incident? Tulsa had protests and demonstrations, but not violence.

Some people credit Tulsa officials with releasing police video of Terence Crutcher’s shooting promptly and arresting the officer, but those steps were not immediate. Charlotte ignited almost instantly on Tuesday.

Part of the difference may be the settings — beside an abandoned vehicle with only police and the victim present in Tulsa, vs. in a busy neighborhood with a wife shouting in the background in Charlotte.

The highly charged reactions of people at the scene of Scott’s killing spread through social media and set people off.

The angry reaction arose in a city and state that may be more racially and economically divided than Tulsa, Okla. — and more on edge about disparities. Upward mobility in North Carolina trails the rest of the nation; it’s especially hard for North Carolina children born into poverty to work their way out of it.

So, yes, people are distrustful of officials who refuse to release police video from the crime scene. They are suspicious of a law that will soon prohibit the release of police video without a court order. Another black man is dead, another police officer is accused.

And nothing seems to change.

Elizabeth Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.