On Daunte Wright
Daunte Wright was murdered on April 11. As the story goes, Kim Potter allegedly didn’t mean to do it. She mistook a gun for a taser. She has already been charged with involuntary manslaughter. In a sense the official story will be correct. Perhaps Kim Potter didn’t mean to murder Daunte Wright. She was simply negligent. It wasn’t her that murdered Daunte Wright. At least, she didn’t do it by herself. Nope. The murder of Daunte Wright was the result of a system of law enforcement that is overmilitarized, unnecessarily aggressive, and completely unaccountable.
In the wake of this latest police shooting of a young Black man, all the media conversation and coverage has essentially been on how a 26-year veteran of the police force could mistake a gun for a taser. The real question is why did the police respond so viciously as a result of a traffic stop? Why did the police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota lack the empathy to understand why during a pandemic someone would be driving with expired registration? Just by this standard alone, the traffic stop was unnecessary. However, the police did pull Wright over and they discovered that he had an outstanding warrant, which may be connected to a specious charge concerning possession of a gun without a warrant. In any case, Wright likely didn’t know about the warrant and his lawyer has attested that he never was alerted to an outstanding warrant for his client’s arrest.
If anything, Daunte Wright had a history of fleeing the police, not being a threat to them. At the time of his arrest he was minding his own business and was not a threat to society whatsoever. However, the police energized by the fact that he had an outstanding misdemeanor warrant, engaged him with several police officers and assumed the most aggressive stance as if he was a hardened violent criminal. Apparently, Wright was trying to get back into his car to flee the police when he was fatally shot.
The situation is just baffling on so many levels. The police never had to pull him over for expired registration in the context of the COVID pandemic. Even if they were justified in pulling him over and the found a warrant for his arrest, the crime was not a violent one. There was no need to engage Wright in such an aggressive manner. Even if Wright was attempting to reenter his vehicle and flee the scene, there was no cause for him to be tasered, much less shot. Consider what would have happened had he fled the scene. The car was his mother’s, the police had all of Wright’s identification information, and the registration for the car. They wouldn’t have even needed to run the license plates to figure out how to apprehend Wright at a later and probably safer time. Given the nature of the incident Wright would have likely been counselled by his parents and his lawyer to turn himself in. He would have probably shown up at the police station the next day. The sad part is we’ll never know because now a twenty-year-old kid is dead.
Kim Potter shooting Daunte Wright may have been a mistake, but Daunte Wright was murdered by the system. Racism and fear led America to engage in a war on drugs which has overmilitarized the police. An overly aggressive legal system criminalizes non-violent and petty crimes which result disproportionately in poor people paying penalties that are too severe for the infractions. Systemic racism mires Black people in poverty disproportionately. Both explicit prejudice and implicit bias cause police to stop Black people at higher rates than Whites for minor traffic infractions. All of this leads to a very special American elixir which harasses, over polices, exploits, traumatizes, and kills Black people at alarming rates on an annual basis.
This has to stop. There should never be a situation where a police officer can kill a person and chalk it up to “negligence.” If police are trained professionals as they like to claim, every shooting in the line of duty must have purpose. Beyond that, there simply should be less shootings. We must reexamine why police are being armed and sent to use violent force against nonviolent offenders. And if we as a society is going to continue to accept over militarized police forces, we must be willing to hold police to a much higher standard for de-escalation, and restraint when it comes to the use of violence.