Prosecutors declined Friday to retry a young black man whose arrest this summer at a San Francisco BART station highlighted issues of race in policing. The decision ends the criminal case stemming from a controversial arrest caught on video.

Videos of BART police officers arresting Michael Smith on July 29 went viral and showed the aftermath of a 911 call reporting a threatened robbery and a black man who potentially had a gun.

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Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg said the context of race and policing impacted the case.

“This case sort of fell into the strike zone of a whole bunch of vectors in legal and police controversies in recent years,” he said, noting that while the San Francisco Police Department was not involved in the case, the prolonged scrutiny on the city’s police force was likely in the minds of jurors.

Like Adachi, Weisberg wondered whether an unconfirmed report that Smith may have had a gun should provoke a more subdued police response.

“We simply don’t know how careful the police were to confirm or disprove the allegation that Mr. Smith was carrying a weapon,” Weisberg said. “All they knew is someone reported that. That gives them a pretty good reason to suspect the person has a weapon, but maybe not an automatic inference of it.”