Why so high? The Phoenix metropolitan area, with the highest rate of fatal police shootings among the 10 biggest U.S. cities, is also the most dangerous in the nation for Latinos.

IT WAS HOT AND QUIET IN MESA, Arizona, as a crowd gathered outside the headquarters of the police department on Aug. 25, 2007. On this day in 2003, the parents of 15-year-old Mario Madrigal Jr. called the police in a panic because their oldest son was threatening to kill himself with a kitchen knife. Within hours, they found themselves watching helplessly as Mario Jr. was shot and killed by police officers, who say he had threatened them with the knife. Four years later, about 100 people, most of them wearing black T-shirts, joined the family in insisting that Mario was a threat to no one but himself that night and that he was killed by a police force ill-equipped to ...