Lawrence Powell

Lawrence Powell, 41, a Black man, was killed in Detroit, Michigan, on September 6, 2013, in a case that surfaced online not through a front-page headline, but through the kind of grim, running tally that tried to keep pace with the city’s violence that year. That entry places the fatal incident at the 3900 block of Canton Street, where he was found inside with a gunshot wound, down on the floor.

In the sparse way the record is written, the scene feels frozen in a single frame: an addre ...