In the last two weeks, Americans have been treated to two horrible murders that each involve young black teens.

The first was the gunning down of Chris Lane, a college student from Australia out for a jog during a visit to Oklahoma. The other was the beating to death of an 88-year-old World War II vet, Delbert Belton, in Spokane, Wash. Though a white teen was also involved in Lane’s shooting, the other four perps are all young black men.

As a result, we now have a heated national debate about whether these are reverse Trayvon Martin cases.

This is a debilitating argument. These cases remind us of the wisdom of Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, who only a few months ago was featured on the front page of The New York Times. The story was based in part on a dressing-down McCormack had given one of his officers, Pedro Serrano, for a reluctance to make stops. And it was presented as proof of racial profiling.

In fact, what McCormack was trying to get across to Officer Serrano was the department’s obligation to police vigorously so that the community in question would be a “a better nonviolent place . . . [where] no kids will get shot, no 68-year-old going . . . to church on a Sunday morning.”

Critics of stop-and-frisk have largely succeeded in defining it as a program solely to get guns off the street. It does do that. But it’s also about stopping crime in a community by stopping suspicious characters.

And it is a fact that, with crime down, fewer African-American men are being sent off to prison in New York these days. There may be many reasons. But in the wake of two murders that have commandeered the nation’s headlines, maybe we should look at stop-and-frisk not just for how it keeps communities safe.

Maybe we should also be looking at how it has helped keep young men in dangerous neighborhoods from going down the path of crime in the first place.