There’s a lot we don’t know about Daunte Wright’s death yesterday and what led to it, but it seems, at this moment, that the 20-year-old’s shooting yesterday afternoon by a police officer in a Minnesota suburb was as clearly avoidable as these come:
If you’re looking for the full story, here’s a rundown. It’s tragic. It’s unsurprising. This happens all the time.
It isn’t always traffic stops. It’s all sorts of things. But Black people die at the hands of police officers too often. And it needs, obviously, to stop happening.
There are scores upon scores of complicated factors that have created this tragic trend and that continue to fuel it. With this shooting, there are factors beyond the gun/taser mistake that I’m omitting here because of what remains unknown, and because I want to focus on the simplest, clearest issue. But at this moment, in this case, with this shooting…it’s hard not to be gutted by the fact that there was any way in hell for a police officer to mistake her gun for her taser and fire it. I admittedly don’t know enough about policing to offer a solution—training, safety protocol, etc. But there must be a solution that makes this specific mistake impossible. There must be.
