*(Via Insider) – April 11, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was driving down a street in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. As many of us made sure to do at his age, he had an air-freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror. But in Minnesota, it’s illegal to have items dangling from your rear-view mirror, and so, according to Daunte’s mother, this prompted Brooklyn Center police to pull him over. Daunte was killed moments later.
After a night of heated protests, Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon held a press conference and said that the officer who killed Daunte, 26-year veteran Kim Potter, accidentally used her gun instead of her Taser. In body cam footage of the shooting, the she can be heard yelling “Taser! Taser!” before shooting Daunte with her firearm.
Potter has been charged with second-degree manslaughter, so Daunte’s family may see justice. But the incident still speaks to many glaring issues with law enforcement. How could an experienced veteran mistake her gun for a Taser? Why does an officer need a gun for a traffic stop anyway?
The most prominent of these issues deals with why Daunte was pulled over in the first place. Whether it was for the air-freshener or for, as police say, expired tags, it has little to do with traffic violations themselves. It has everything to do with what police can find afterwards.
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Minority report
In 2014, I was pulled over in Columbus, Ohio, driving my older brother’s Nissan Maxima. The large sedan had a custom body kit, an over-powering subwoofer in the trunk, and, fatefully, tinted windows. In Ohio, it’s illegal to tint your windows darker than 50%, and while I didn’t know what the percentage of the tint was — the car’s previous owner was the one who tinted it — the white officer who pulled me over thought they were dark enough to investigate.
He told me that dark windows are illegal. I had no idea. He told me to unlock the back doors, and even though I wondered if he was allowed to do that, I complied. He and another officer used blinding flashlights to search around the back seat for anything nefarious. Slightly disoriented from the combination of blue lights from the police cruiser and the frantic illumination coming from the officers’ flashlights, I waited in the driver’s seat, bouncing my knee in a fit of anxiety — not because I had anything illegal in the car, but because this was the start of a painfully familiar story.
The essay/commentary continues at Business Insider.
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