It's fair to say that the relationship between police and young black males is a tortuous one at best.

Not just in Dallas, but in many nooks and crannies across America, from Tulia, Texas, to Oakland, Calif.

That uneasy, historic dance makes it nearly impossible for anyone to tiptoe around the racial dynamics of a story that has blown up the Internet and, before all is said and done, may implode the career of one egotistical young cop.

Fine, you say, Dallas police Officer Robert Powell gets what he deserves – whether that means being relegated to a coat closet pushing paper all day or being stripped of his badge and sent packing.

On this much, we can all agree: Powell blew it when he detained a family rushing to visit a dying relative.

Here's where the slippery slope turns treacherous: Powell is white, the family he held up is black – and those two ingredients combined, when sufficiently mixed and stirred, are a recipe for dynamite.

Powell lit the fuse.

Despite repeated pleas for sympathy and leniency from the red light-running driver he pulled over – NFL player Ryan Moats – Powell, figuratively speaking, pounded his chest and exhibited the sulking swagger of a school-yard bully.

"I can make your night very difficult," he boasted to Moats.

Moats, resigned to the ever-increasing likelihood that his mother-in-law would die while he was stuck in the hospital's parking lot verbally tussling with Powell, acquiesced to the overbearing antics: "I hope you'll be a great person and not do that," he said.

By then, of course, it was much too late for Powell to be a "great person," much less a compassionate one.

Moats' mother-in-law, Jonetta Collinsworth, died before he and Collinsworth's father could break free of Powell. Luckily, Moats' wife, Tamishia, and her aunt ignored Powell and ran into the hospital.

More gratuitous still, all of this was captured on videotape, thanks to the dashboard camera mounted in Powell's car. Without it, most of us in the peanut gallery would be inclined to take the cop's spin on things. And it's easy to imagine Powell employing typical butt-covering jargon such as "Moats refused to cooperate" or "the suspect acted belligerently."

That self-serving semantics shield is gone.

The videotape will help police commanders and Police Chief David Kunkle walk in Powell's moccasins.

So let's start there, let's quickly retrace the steps that Powell stumbled through to the brink of his career.

First, no one can question Powell for stopping Moats, who acknowledged that he ran through a red light after stopping briefly.

I also understand why Powell would pull out his gun once Moats and others started piling out of the car. Keep in mind that the young officer still doesn't know what he's dealing with here. His adrenaline is bound to be pumping.

It is at this precise moment, when Powell set his eyes on Moats, where the color of Moats' skin quite possibly won the football player no favors.

This is where that tortuous racial history I mentioned comes into play, where Powell just may have cut Moats some slack had he been better able to identify with him – if he'd seen Moats more as a fellow human and less as a suspect.

But, history aside, that's an awful easy assertion to make, and a much more difficult claim to prove. Which is why the emphasis needs to be focused elsewhere, and why no one should play the race card like it's the deal-breaking ace in the hole in this case.

It's not.

It's more like a wild card.

Even Ryan Moats and his distraught wife, Tamishia, downplayed the angle initially when they were asked if they thought race played a factor.

"We're not the kind of people who play the racial card," Tamishia Moats said. "We're not those people. We have been brought up in a very diverse society."

Her husband said he didn't know "if it was a racial thing," either. "I never really throw that card. From my point of view, he [Powell] wasn't going to listen to reason at all. He didn't care what I was saying."

Powell certainly isn't representative of the entire police department, who can best be measured by the guy at the top.

"I am embarrassed and disappointed by the behavior of one of our police officers," said Kunkle, who publicly apologized to Moats and his family. "His [Powell's] behavior, in my opinion, did not exhibit the common sense, discretion, the compassion that we expect our officers to exhibit."

Kunkle, by the way, is white – and he's as fair-minded a chief as you'll find, bar none.

What he's faced with here is a wet-behind-the-ears cop who exercised poor judgment and raised serious doubts about whether he's cut out for the job.

That doesn't make him a racist – but it certainly buys him an invitation to a tired old dance.