Darren Wilson, the police officer whose shooting triggered the Ferguson, Mo., disturbances has now presented his side of the story to a grand jury.

From initial reports, Wilson’s account is that he was pinned in his vehicle and in fear for his life as he struggled over his gun with Michael Brown, who punched and scratched him repeatedly.

Brown was shot and wounded when reaching into the vehicle, then fatally shot after the officer exited.

The autopsy of Brown showed, consistent with the cop’s story, a gunshot to the hand from close range.

If, as the officer apparently claims, Brown was charging him when he fired the deadly shots, then the facts presented by Wilson support a case of self-defense.

This is so even if Brown was unarmed. Self-defense law considers deadly force justified when the actor (Wilson in this case) reasonably believes he’s facing an imminent deadly threat.

The operative words are “reasonably believes.” The shooter doesn’t have to predict accurately that he faced death, he need only act reasonably under the circumstances.

And since Brown had already shown himself to be aggressive and violent, Wilson might’ve reasonably believed that Brown would attack him again — and, with his size and strength, be able to secure the officer’s weapon.

If the grand jurors find the justifiable-homicide narrative plausible, it’s highly likely that the case against Wilson will evaporate.

What if the officer’s explanation turns out to be true? What if race had nothing at all to do with this incident? What if it was just a cop shooting a threatening young male?

If so, then the media and the Obama administration have some explaining to do.

The media jumped on the racial scenario with gleeful abandon.

In fact, as Noah Rothman recounts in the October issue of Commentary, reporters exacerbated the situation by intentionally placing themselves in harm’s way once police responded to the incipient rioting, then interviewed one another about police use of force.

The press, in short, did everything it could to place the police in a negative light.

To be sure, racist-white-cop-shoots-unarmed-black-youth is an old story in America, going back over a century. That history explains African-American sensitivity when interracial police incidents occur and perhaps it explains the media’s knee-jerk reaction to Ferguson.

But police departments have changed dramatically in recent decades. Virtually all departments make special efforts to hire African-American officers and work with local black leaders to improve community relations.

Moreover, shootings of blacks by police — indeed, all shootings by police — have declined dramatically since 1995. In New York City, for instance, shots fired by NYPD officers from 1995 to 2010 dropped 80 percent.

Had they been more responsible, reporters and editors would have treated the Missouri shooting incident as an event to be explained, especially since everyone knew that young Ferguson blacks were seething and ready to riot.

But fanning the flames turned a local incident into a national scandal — and gave the media a blazing hot news item. Creating a frenzy in order to sell newspapers is another old story in America.

The Obama administration also did itself no great honors. As tensions mounted, Attorney General Eric Holder flew to Ferguson to investigate possible racial abuse by the local police.

The message was clear: The Wilson shooting was probably racially motivated — and the administration believed it was the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe here, too, self-interest was at work. A recently publicized internal memo from a former Obama pollster concluded that the black vote was the last best hope for the Democrats to hold on to a majority in the Senate.

Could Holder’s trip to Ferguson have been intended to exploit the racial turmoil and motivate blacks to vote?

As for so-called civil-rights leaders like Al Sharpton, they acted and always act predictably. Exploiting interracial incidents is their stock in trade. The media should have given them less coverage, but that would have been inconsistent with the racial narrative they’d already embraced.

It is time to start deracializing Ferguson. The media should present Officer Wilson’s side of the story and explain the law of self-defense.

If the local grand jury declines to indict Wilson, the Holder Justice Department should accept its decision and drop the civil-rights case against the officer.

Federal intervention is justified only when the local authorities are clearly biased and the investigative processes are not working properly. There is no evidence of either bias or coverup by the Missouri authorities — just as there was no evidence of bias in the shooting itself.

Barry Latzer is professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. His history of violent crime in the United States, “Murder, Mayhem Mugging” is due out in 2015.