This. Someone who is prone to getting panicky and confused in a stressful situation should find another line of work. We’ve seen far too much of this, with police screaming their fool heads off at someone for “failing to comply.”
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Especially for a guy that’s already on a warrant for carrying a gun without a permit, if he’s going into his car, the assumption can easily be that he’s going for a gun there, not just to flee.
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At the moment our knowledge and understanding of the evidence indicates that this is precisely what happened, she meant to use the taser and accidentally discharged the gun. (There certainly are cops who will shoot to kill when they perceive a black suspect trying to escape. Those cops might look for all kinds of excuses later but they will not yell “taser” just as they are about to use a gun, they know what they are doing and they believe in their right to do it.)
So the improbability of accidentally mistaking a gun for a taser must be weighed against this evidence. And, however unlikely such a mistake is, it is not an impossible mistake, there is clearly a record of a relatively small but non-vanishing number of cases of this type.
Again, none of the above is to justify problems with our system of policing. But we must differentiate between the culpability of individual officers and culpability of the system. In this case (and in my current opinion), while the officer appears to be criminally culpable (for something like manslaughter or negligent homicide), the system has a much higher degree of culpability.
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“The initial grounds for the traffic stop were expired tags,”
You’ve got his license plate # and if that’s not enough, get his driver’s license. Why is it soooo necessary to bring him in immediately?
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They don’t weigh the same either.
As I recall, it wasn’t his vehicle, but his mother’s. I think that was in the earlier story, but I could be mistaken?
ETA: Not quite, but from the earlier story:
Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, told KARE that he called her during the traffic stop, saying that police had pulled him over for hanging air fresheners on his mirror. She said he asked her for car insurance information, as she’d given him the car two weeks prior. Then, she said she heard police tell Wright to get out of the car.
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Only about a quarter of officers have ever fired their weapons in the line of duty. In careers that can span decades.
Which means that there’s limited ability to tell how an individual is going to react to specific situations until, well, they’re in one of those situations.
Folks in the military can relate. It’s only when facing actual combat that you find out who is going to fall to pieces and who will keep their wits about them.
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It appears she intended to use a taser not a gun. A taser would do nothing to tires.
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And this is the deal - people make mistakes, and in moments of panic and high anxiety, they can make mistakes that seem completely unbelievable from the outside.
Unfortunately for surgeons and airline pilots and police, sometimes a boneheaded mistake results in someone’s death. I wouldn’t want to live with it, just like I wouldn’t want to live in a world where my child was killed because a nervous cop made a mistake.
Since there are virtually zero trustworthy statistics on police violence anywhere in this country, we don’t know how often a mistake like this may happen. This is a tragedy within a tragedy inside of an insane system where poorly educated people who just want a job are given the option of deadly force to deal with most situations.
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Something like this happened several years back, but the inadvertant shooter was some elderly guy who liked to ride with the cops, and they let him because he was a big contributor. He gave enough that they even let him carry a gun – and a taser.
Yet more evidence that the Twin City cops need better training. A few convictions ought to make that point clearer.
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This is what happens when each state has their own six week police academy; a high school diploma and minimal psychological evaluation.
Police unions should underwrite every cities policies for police negligence- that bad apples would be gone the day their bank account drained.
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I had always assumed that the rearview mirror was where you hung your auto scent thingie. I guess not in Minnesota…
To get his driver’s license they need to stop him. My understanding (which may be outdated already) is that once they stopped him or once they got his license they ran his name and learned about misdemeanor warrant. Once that happened they decided to arrest him (I remember a quote from MN law, maybe posted up the thread, which authorizes cops to arrest on the misdemeanor warrant when a person is stopped for other reasons).
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So in many states, it is in fact illegal to hang anything from your car, e.g., from your rearview mirror, but it is rarely enforced, and I would imagine even more so in the time of COVID. So many people hang their masks from the rear view, or they hang a parking pass, or they have some other ID that is required for the vehicle, yet this law persist. I have a city authorized parking tag for my car even though this law is still on the books. So the city has created a parking system and the way to use it technically violates the law, yet this got through city legal.
My point is these guys used this as an excuse to pull this man over. The entire point of the law is so their is no obstruction of vision for the driver, so I am sure the officers explained that in their traffic stop, not!
Another sad day for Black Americans and the rest of us that see this kind of crap as a danger to all of us forming a more perfect union.
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According to the police, the car had expired tags.
Which is pretty likely if you’re shooting down at tires on asphalt or concrete. Shooting the tires is probably not a good option.
I try to imagine myself in a stressful situation with a gun on my right, because I’m right-handed, and a taser and a baton on my left. And I’m in a stressful situation. And I want to kill the son of a bitch.
So I don’t reach around my body with my right hand to pull out my Taser because that won’t kill the son of a bitch.
Manslaughter is in order.
If this is allowed to stand we will see multiple uses of this defense and killings by police of black people.
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I read the article in the Tribune, where did it say that?
Also, they say in this article and others that this man had a warrant, what for, seems something that any reporter should be able to find out kind of easily.
Cops being afraid of the public and holding a gun to control their fear is not a good model for policing. If someone threatens the police with a gun, they will be filmed. Particularly for traffic stops. They know who you are and god help you if you shoot at an unarmed police man,
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It’s in the linked article below. The report that it was because of the hanging tag was relayed by the mother of the victim as to what he had told her.
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