By Steve Sailer
04/12/2021
From The New York Times news section:
Minnesota Officer Who Shot Daunte Wright Meant to Fire Taser, Chief Says
Officials from Brooklyn Center said that the fatal shooting was an “accidental discharge,” and released body-camera video of the encounter.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Julie Bosman
April 12, 2021BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. — The police officer who killed a man in a Minneapolis suburb on Sunday did so accidentally, officials said Monday, releasing a graphic body-camera video that appeared to depict the officer shouting, “Taser!” before firing her gun.
“It is my belief that the officer had the intention to deploy their Taser, but instead shot Mr. Wright with a single bullet,” Chief Tim Gannon of the Brooklyn Center Police Department said of the shooting on Sunday of Daunte Wright, 20, during a traffic stop. “This appears to me, from what I viewed, and the officer’s reaction and distress immediately after, that this was an accidental discharge that resulted in a tragic death of Mr. Wright.”
The officer, who was not publicly identified, has been placed on administrative leave, officials said. Chief Gannon said that Mr. Wright had been initially pulled over because of an expired registration on the vehicle he was driving. The video showed a brief struggle between Mr. Wright and police officers before one of the officers fired her gun.
After the officer fired, she is heard on the video saying, “Holy shit. I just shot him.”
In the hours after the shooting on Sunday afternoon, protests, violence and looting broke out in Brooklyn Center, a suburb of 30,000 people north of Minneapolis. The shooting comes amid a national reckoning over police misconduct and the killings of Black people by the police; Mr. Wright was Black. City officials did not identify the race of the police officer.
At no point does the article state that the inept shooter was a “woman” or was “female.” But if you read carefully, you might notice the pronouns “her” and “she.” But Shattering The Stereotype that black men are always gunned down by racist white male cops is not a high priority at the Times.
This sounds like the Botham Jean shooting in which the accountant was killed in his own apartment by a confused woman cop who thought she was at her own apartment door because she’d gotten off at the wrong floor of the building.
A big difference, however, is that Mr. Jean was wholly innocent (and his survivors in his family behaved superbly to avoid stoking racial hate), while Mr. Wright was wanted for arrest on a gross misdemeanor warrant. As a post-George Floyd Black man (by the way, in the spirit of the times, shouldn’t “man” be capitalized when used with Black? E.g., “A Black Man punched up at a white-privileged white male, who was hospitalized with a broken skull.”), Mr. Wright enjoys the protection of the new Zeroth Amendment of the Bill of Rights: “No Black Man need submit to arrest unless he’s damn well in the mood to be arrested.”
So his getting back in the car, presumably intending to drive off unarrested (or perhaps to grab a gun and start shooting), is what made the incompetent woman cop grab for her taser and instead come up with her gun.
From another NYT article:
He was facing two misdemeanor charges after the Minneapolis police said he had carried a pistol without a permit and had run from officers last June.
In other words, the cops on Sunday were already scared, with good reason, when they got out of the squad car that Wright might be packing an illegal gun again and that he might either use it on them or again flee arrest.
Adrenaline, it’s a helluva drug.
By the way, that reminds me that the Biden Administration is making a big push on gun control … at the same time that the Biden-aligned Establishment is pushing against enforcing existing gun control laws on people who carry illegal concealed weapons as long as they are black: why are we constantly trying to arrest black men who are merely found to be carrying an illegal handgun? What harm has a black man packing an undocumented pistol ever caused anybody? Why are cops being distracted from the real murder menace: white men with scary-looking rifles?
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