On September 6, Dallas police officer Amber Guyger entered the apartment of her upstairs neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, removed her service weapon, and shot the twenty-six-year-old man, killing him. One week later, on the day of Jean’s funeral, a Dallas judge released to the press the results of a search warrant that claimed to find a small amount of marijuana in the slain man’s apartment. “There could only be one purpose for that,” family attorney Lee Merritt said of the search warrant. “The only purpose is to look for information to smear the dead. That is exactly their specific intent.”

For black residents of Dallas, it was a familiar story. From police dragging their feet in arresting Guyger to Guyger’s conflicting statements about what happened to the marijuana found in Jean’s apartment, it appeared the fix was in. “There’s a lot of anger in the streets,” Dallas Pastor Frederick Haynes told the Dallas Morning News. “We’ve seen this movie too often.”

In Texas, like elsewhere, it is extremely rare for police to receive any sanction — personal or professional — for killing another human being. As the Jean case lurches toward its seemingly inevitable, devastating outcome, there will be the usual calls for police reform; the handwringing about training and accountability. But a look at the trade journals, message boards, and public behavior of police shows that the authoritarian mentality runs so deep that even minor reforms will be met with an intractable, reactionary wall.