Minnesota police shooting brings new tensions, protests
What happened
Just 10 miles from the Minneapolis courthouse where police officer Derek Chauvin is being tried for murder, another black man was shot dead in a confrontation with a police officer, leading to new protests, rioting, and looting. Twenty-year old Daunte Wright was killed in the suburb of Brooklyn Center this week by a police officer, Kimberly Potter, who appears to have mistaken her sidearm for a taser. Wright had been pulled over for an expired registration. While he was being arrested for a warrant related to a misdemeanor gun charge, Wright got into his car and tried to flee. Body camera footage shows a scuffle in which several officers are pulling him from the vehicle when Officer Kim Potter yells “Taser!” She then fires a shot into Wright’s chest. Potter, a 26-year police veteran, resigned, as did the department’s police chief, Tim Gannon. Potter, 48, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter.
In a separate case in Virginia, made public in a lawsuit filed this month, body camera video showed a Black and Latino Army officer getting pepper-sprayed, knocked to the ground, and handcuffed during a traffic stop. Lt. Caron Nazario, 27, was driving through Windsor, Va., on Dec. 5 when Officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker pulled him over for not having a license plate. Nazario, who had a temporary plate displayed, drove for less than a mile to a well-lit gas station. As the officers approached with their guns drawn, Nazario, wearing his uniform, told them that he was “afraid to get out” of the car, and Gutierrez replied, “Yeah, you should be.”
What the columnists said
“Has nothing been learned from George Floyd’s death?” asked The Washington Post in an editorial. Nazario was wearing his combat fatigues at the time of the traffic stop and spoke to the officers with deference and respect. In return, he was clearly “mistreated” by Crocker and Gutierrez, both of whom behaved toward him with “contempt and belligerence.” They refused to explain even why they had pulled Nazario over—and threatened to ruin his military career if he spoke out.
Mistaking a handgun for a taser is grossly negligent, not a “reasonable or excusable error,” said Andrew McCarthy in National Review.com. But that does not mean that Wright should not have been stopped or arrested on his misdemeanor gun charge. It’s not a cop’s job to second-guess whether a judge’s warrant is worthy of action—especially “if the suspect resists and attempts to flee.”
“Why do we need armed authorities to enforce traffic violations anyway?” asked Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason.com. Such fraught interactions needlessly put both police officers and drivers in harm’s way when video and photographs can easily be taken and citations issued by mail, as they already are for speeding cases in some jurisdictions. That we’re not doing this “shows how much authorities rely on routine—and often pretextual—traffic stops as a way to search for drugs or find other reasons to harass and arrest people they don’t like the looks of.”