Timeline of an Accidental Firearms Discharge

Several signs in George Floyd Square in Minneapolis honored Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by a police officer this week.  Credit...Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

April 13, 2021

"This appears to me, from what I viewed and the officers' reaction and distress immediately after, that this was an accidental discharge that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Wright."

Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon

 

"I want to say that our hearts are aching right now."

We are in pain right now. And we recognize that this couldn't have happened at a worse time."

"We will get to the bottom of this. We will do all that is in our power to make sure that justice is done for Daunte Wright."

Brooklyn Park Mayor Mike Elliott 

"It is really a tragic thing that happened, but I think we've got to wait and see what the investigation shows."

"In the meantime, I want to make it clear again: There is absolutely no justification -- none -- for looting, no justification for violence."

"Peaceful protests: understandable."

U.S. President Joe Biden

April 14, 2021

"I'm hoping this will bring some calm to the community [resignation of Officer Kim Potter and Police Chief Tim Gannon]."

"We want to send a message to the community that we are taking this situation seriously."

Brooklyn Park Mayor Mike Elliott

"[We are calling for a] full and transparent investigation [following] yet another shooting of a Black man."

Former U.S. President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama

"My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. ... I miss him so much, and it's only been a day."

"He was my life, he was my son and I can never get that back."

"Because of a mistake? Because of an accident?"

Katie Wright, mother of Daunte Wright

15 April, 2021

"While we appreciate that the district attorney is pursuing justice for Daunte, no conviction can give the Wright family their loved one back."

]"This was no accident. This was an intentional, deliberate, and unlawful use of force."

"Driving while Black continues to result in a death sentence."

Attorney Benjamin Crump, Wright family representative

Officer Kim Potter submitted her resignation after the fatal shooting.

 

Tensions are high in the United States. A country where a  black was popularly voted in for two presidential terms of office. A country where increasingly police chiefs in numerous American cities are black, and where many cities in the nation have elected black mayors. Black politicians abound in Congress. Black CEOs of important corporations have made their way to the top of the business ladder. Black actors have amply demonstrated that they have the talent to star in motion pictures, the favourite entertainment medium of Americans. Black sport figures ably outperform their non-black counterparts.

In academia black professors rise to the apex of the academic world. Black physicians, researchers and health-care specialists distinguish themselves with their capacity to perform at a level comparable with any of their non-black peers. And yet. Blacks are over-represented in prisons, perpetrators of crime outdistancing their numbers in society. When Barack Obama worked in Chicago as a community organizer he was extremely careful at night to avoid encountering black thugs.

Black families live lives of privation in numbers greater than their white counterparts, and their presence in gangs and violence is comparatively larger than their equally-deprived white counterparts. Statistics indicate that, on the other hand, violent police interactions between black and white groups do not result in greater numbers of blacks being injured or killed than whites. 

While there is an undeniably shameful history of mistreatment and gross inhumanity perpetrated on a people brought from another continent to Europe, the Middle East and North America to serve as slaves and America's history is particularly damning in its treatment of its black population, white Americans of conscience have always deprecated the situation and fought with their black neighbours for justice.

Protesters marching toward the Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police headquarters on Tuesday.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

 

Undeniably, there is a racist, bigoted and hateful undercurrent in society difficult to expunge, with people clinging to their discriminatory biases. There always has been, and likely always will be. It is an experience common to those demographics that are not Caucasian and considered inferior by the sociopathic racists in any society. The underbelly of black gangsterism, violence and criminality feeds into this racist swamp, just as blacks can claim that poverty and injustice drives them to the underworld.

A 20-year-old black man in a suburb of Minneapolis was the victim of what was claimed to be an "accidental discharge" by a veteran police officer, drawing her gun when she intended to bring out her Taser to subdue a man who was trying to physically overpower her intention to arrest him for a traffic violation; driving with an expired car registration. Wanted, additionally for arrest on a criminal charge. A traffic stop video demonstrated a struggle between the man and the female officer, recording her shouting, "Taser! Taser!", failing to stop him from driving off.

This incident occurring in the foreground of a trial of another police officer accused of deliberately murdering another black man, whose death reverberated globally and his name became a beacon of outrage against white-on-black violence with George Floyd becoming a symbol of all that was wrong in America. Causing an outflow of international sympathy, and massive protest marches that turned into violent events of looting, destroying private and public properties, issuing threats and brutally violent confrontations.

The very real fear of a repeat of the massive public displays of unleashed brutality in the name of protesting brutality spurred authorities not to respond by retaking public order and security but doing little in the face of unbridled rage and destruction, for fear of causing even worse mass violence to erupt. That yet another black man dying with a police officer accused of murder in the very place where the original trial is taking place warns authorities yet again that more chaos is in the offing unless they bow to popular misconceptions and misconstructions.

There must be those who fall on their swords in recompense whether or not they followed the letter of the law. The latest death, of a man whom the police realized had an outstanding warrant for his arrest, who chose to grapple with them rather than submit to arrest, has all the hallmarks in the reaction of related authorities of submission to the rage of the mob. The town's mayor chose not to accept officer Potter's resignation, in favour of symbolically firing her. And out with the police chief who rationalized the event.

Leading to Minnesota authorities arresting the now-former police officer, a 26-year-veteran who knows intimately what violence and threats lead to, and struggled to defend herself according to her training and her gut reaction. She is to be charged with second-degree manslaughter, taken into custody, and booked in jail for the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright. The prosecution must now prove Kim Potter, in her duty as a police officer was "culpably negligent", taking an "unreasonable risk" in action against Wright.

Convicted, the charge carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison along with a $20,000 fine. The punishment trial of Derek Chauvin, taking place mere miles away, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd a year ago offers ample examples of how this new trial will eventually proceed. In each of these cases, the black men whose lives were so tragically ended, were not male criminal ingenues; they had backgrounds of crime.

Being black and criminally-involved does not equate with death-as-just-desserts. But the very fact that blacks are given to criminal action, and blacks happen to murder other blacks at a rate far greater than blacks die at the hands of whites is a fact of life. One cannot hold life cheaply in some circumstances and dearly in others. And the human toll of distrust and anger between black and white leaves each in fear of facing death at the hands of the other.

In this very particular instance, the current president's statement calling for justice and for calm in arriving at that point, is far more reasonable than the one issued by his predecessor, but in this climate of black-lives-matter reason has little influence over passion.

"The key issue is whether somebody acted reasonably under the circumstances, whether they created this risk of harm."

"The state of mind of the officer is at the core of what we ask the jury to decide. In this case we’re really talking about: Is the accidental shooting forgivable or not?"

Steven Wright,  associate professor, University of Wisconsin Law School

79 people arrested following demonstration for Daunte Wright   
A citywide curfew went into effect in Brooklyn Center at 10 p.m., and some of those arrested were charged with unlawful assembly and inciting a riot.  Credit: CNN