So yesterday we learned that Kim Potter (the cop that killed Daunte Wright) thought that she was holding her taser when she fired the fatal shot that killed him.
I watched the video, and I believe that’s what happened. I know that’s not a popular assessment, but it’s what I saw. She was genuinely horrified when she realized that she shot her gun at him. That’s not where the central problem of this encounter lies in my opinion.
The fact that they pulled Duante over because of a fucking air freshener is the problem. The cops claim that he was pulled over for expired tags, but the fact that they didn’t release that part of the video tells me that the family is probably telling the truth when they say that he was pulled over for the air freshener in his car. That’s where the racism started.
I live in Manhattan now, so I don’t have a car. When I lived in CA and did drive, I never used air fresheners so I’m not an expert here but I’m very certain that white people don’t get pulled over for their goddamned air fresheners. I’ve never known anyone who got pulled over for such an obviously stupid reason, and I’ve never heard a story of anyone being pulled over under those circumstance. When I was in CA, I lived in the bay area and then an upper class neighborhood in LA. Believe me when I tell tell you that an “I got pulled over for an air freshener” story would have reverberated in the privileged neighborhoods that I’ve lived in. It doesn’t fucking happen.
That’s where the problem is; cops instigate more contact with people of color than they do with nice white folks. The more engagement you have with a community, the more infractions or crimes you’re going to find. That’s an obvious truth that no one whose being an honest actor can deny. I’m not going to get into the stats of white marijuana usage vs black marijuana usage and the gigantic disparity in incarceration rates because you can look that up, and that’s not what this post is specifically about. The point is that the more you police a community, you will find more reasons for arrests.
This should be the focus of our conversations. If you find yourself getting into the minutiae of unpacking every aspect of these encounters, you’ve missed the central issue with the racism in policing in America. “Why did he run?”, “he was resisting arrest”… all of these things are irrelevant. I’m not even going to get into the fight or flight instincts that any group of people would develop if they were constantly being harassed by cops. That’s not the central issue here.
Of course Caron Nazario drove a few miles to get to a well lit and more populated area to pull over for the cops. Of course he did. He wanted to increase his odds of survival. Daunte Wright’s instinct to run from police is also understandable but none of those details are as important as why they had those interactions in the first place. Do not find yourself getting sucked into these discussions. When you do, you’re accepting someone else’s deliberately distracting framing of the issue.
There is not one shred of data in any corner of this country to suggest that people of color aren’t being forced to interact with police exponentially more often than white people. Not a single shred, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a fucking racist and you should feel free to point that out after they fail to provide any data to support that assertion. It’s not in the FBI crime reports, it’s not in any city’s data (such as it is) that they track on policing in their city.
The racism begins with instigating the interaction. Full stop. Until we address the disparity in the number of interactions that cops have with different racial groups, we’re just chasing our tails and falling down rabbit holes where we find ourselves having inane conversations about whether Derick Chauvin was the unluckiest bastard in the world for having his knee adjacent to George Floyd’s neck at the exact moment that died of a drug overdose.
Stop it. This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s all stay focused on the central problem here and demand more of the kind of data that we need on how often cops instigate interactions with different racial groups.
