Again?
We haven’t even finished the trial of the man who killed George Floyd, and another black man died at the hands of a police officer just 11 miles away.
This one seems a little different. There’s at least a possibility that Daunte Wright’s death was an accident of sorts, but the result is the same. A police officer plays judge, jury and executioner and a black man died for something he might not even have gone to jail for.
This one is very different in one respect. I’m not sure I can remember another case like this where the shooter was a woman.
Kim Potter, 48, is a 26-year veteran officer who you might think should know the difference between a taser and a handgun.
The story is that Potter and her partner made a traffic stop on Wright for having an expired registration. They also found he had failed to appear in court after having a summons sent to him.
So they pulled him over and told him to get out of the car.
Here’s where the problem starts. I have been pulled over more times than I care to recall in more than half a century of driving, and I don’t recall ever being asked to get out of the car.
Of course, I’m white.
Back in the late ’60s, the days of the so-called counterculture, we used to joke that we knew we would have sold out when we no longer felt a paranoid twinge wehen we saw there was a police car behind us.
Of course, as hip as we wanted to be, we were white kids.
I’ll never pretend to understand the fear some black people feel at the sight of police officers, and I would never write it off as paranoia.
I hate the fact that when my son was in high school, if he had been black, I would have had to have had the talk with him about how to behave around police officers.
I did tell him always to be courteous and call them “officer” or “sir,” but I never spent one minute worrying that a police officer would kill him.
Of course, my son and I are both white.
Always have been.
.Officer Potter told Wright to get out of his car, and he did. But then he got back in as if to leave the scene. She shouted that she would taser him, and she repeated it several times. Then she fired … her pistol.
“Holy shit,” she said. “I shot him.”
And he died.
Of course, he was black.
Potter resigned the next day, and while I think it was the right thing to do, I think something else came into play as well. I have a hunch something else came into play. I think it’s possible that the difference between resigning and being fired is whether she will receive her pension.
By most accounts, Potter was a good officer. She was certainly no Derek Chauvin, but whatever happens, she is probably going to have to pay a price for what she did.
If Chauvin goes free for killing Floyd, there might be riots all over the country.
If Potter goes free, I honestly don’t know what to expect.
In the end, though, something has to change.