Today I arranged my day so I could watch the Boston Red Sox (who are on a roll) play the Minnesota Twins in a day game at the Twins’ park. Minutes before the game, it was called off, though the sun was shining and a crowd was on-hand. Why? Well, Daunte Wright, 20, was killed by a police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota., about 10 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
This has, or should have, nothing whatsoever to do with baseball, or any other activity in the Twin Cities or anywhere else. It is a local law enforcement event, and as of now, it is impossible to determine what happened with certainty. Never mind, though: Black Lives Matter has decreed that every death of a black man or woman in a confrontation with police is by definition an undeniable example of race-motivated homicide, and the proper response is to riot.
First and foremost, the proper response is never to riot. Protesting and demonstrating are seldom the proper responses either. Second, rioting, demonstrating, protesting, and making accusations about an event before it has been made clear what in fact occurred, is irresponsible, dangerous and indefensible always, with no exceptions.
The female police officer shot Wright yesterday afternoon after pulling his car over for a traffic violation and discovering that he had a warrant out for his arrest. The police tried to detain Wright; he briefly struggled with police, and then he stepped back into his car, apparently trying to flee.
Of course he did. In the vast majority of these police-involved deaths with black Americans involved, the eventual victim resists the lawful orders of police. George Floyd did it. Mike Brown did it. In such cases, I bristle when I am told, as I heard one activist say today, that the community should “honor” the victim by not rioting. Those who get shot or killed as a direct result of resisting arrest should not be “honored,” because that is not honorable conduct. It is anti-social conduct that ruins some lives and ends others.
Body-camera video released by the police department shows the officer shouting, “Taser!” before firing her gun. She is then heard on the video saying, “Holy shit. I just shot him.”
“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 last night. “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.”
[Aside: It’s HER Taser, you politically correct pronoun toady!]
The officer, who was not publicly identified, has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. Never mind. The mob, which is already imbued with moral authority, assumes that the shooting was intentional, so it was. It assumes that Wright’s death was also based on a racist nation-wide conspiracy. In the photo above, someone has written “Justice for Daunte Wright,” presuming that he was the victim of injustice. If he was legitimately pulled over, and set in motion the chain of events leading to his accidental death by resisting a lawful arrest, then there is no “justice” required. Civil consequences of an officer making a fatal mistake, but not “justice.”
“We will get to the bottom of this,” Mike Elliott, the mayor of Brooklyn Center, said at a news conference on today. “We will do all that is within our power to make sure that justice is done for Daunte Wright.” That’s right, pour gasoline on the flames, you hack. Shut up. But he didn’t, being the irresponsible hack he is and following the lead of so many elected officials last year, adding “My position is that we cannot afford to make mistakes that lead to the loss of life of other people in our profession [Aside: Huh? What profession would that be? Was Daunte a mayor too?] . And so I do fully support releasing the officer of her duties.”
No justice for the police officer, then. No investigation, nothing Got it. That’s the Colin Kaepernick theory: if a black person is killed by a police officer, the officer should be fired, and Facts Don’t Matter. Meanwhile, Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter that he was praying for Mr. Wright’s family “as our state mourns “another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement.”
He’s an ethics villain for writing that. “Another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement” is a smear on the police, and injects presumed racist motives in a tragedy where there is no evidence of one, except that the man shot was black.
Now back to the main topic, which is postponing sporting events. Only one set of circumstances could justify this, and it would be if there was a genuine threat that the rioting would endanger spectators. I cannot say for certain that this wasn’t the case for the Red Sox-Twins game. However the statement from the Twins tried to have it both ways, woke virtue-signaling and caution, as Twins president Dave St. Peter said.
“We came to the conclusion that the right thing to do was for us to not play today rooted in respect for the Wright family but also rooted in our mind in the safety of all of those involved in today’s game against the Red Sox — our fans, our staff, our players and the broader community,”
What does “respect for the Wright family” have to do with it? Is baseball now going to postpone games every time anyone is killed by police, or only if the victim is black? If the Twins don’t postpone a game after the next police-involved shooting, does that mean the team, and thus Major League Baseball, does not have respect for that victim’s family?
Postponing a game in an abundance of caution for fans’ welfare is baseball’s legitimate responsibility; grandstanding support for particular sides in political controversies is not. As with the recent All-Star Game fiasco, once the sport allows itself to be dragged into such controversies, there is no way out. That slippery slope leads to destruction.
Ethics Alarms 
You didn’t mention the subsequent looting of stores as part of the “protest,” but I can think of absolutely nothing that would justify that, even immediate and misplaced community outrage. The death of Wright thus becomes nothing more than an excuse to steal.
A few thoughts:
My “man on the street”view from the ballpark today was 30 degrees and rainy.
As for spectator safety, the stadium is about 8 blocks from the courthouse in which the Chauvin trial is happening (under heavy security).
Looting broke out again near my former office on Lake street, several miles south of downtown, while Wright was killed many miles NORTH of downtown. The stadium could have been fair game, but a few hundred protestors might be no match for several thousand fans. That excuse seems implausible the more I think of it; Minnesota sports fans are used to their teams getting beat up, but that does not mean the fans are wimps.
Finally, it seems as if the Mayor has now fired the police officer involved when she asked for due process (or so the Idiot Box tells me, though I can’t verify that).
-Jut
Oops. It appears the City Manager was fired for calling for due process.
-Jut
I’ll wait for the investigation, but if she shot him on purpose or shot him on accident, she most likely needs to be let go.
Do tasers and service firearms have the same feel when deployed. I am struggling with reconciling a trained officer mistaking a firearm for a taser. If it is easy to mistake the two in a heightened stress encounter it seems that it would be necessary to make each easy to differentiate. Paint the taser orange if that helps avoid such mistakes.
I will be the first to agree that any person encountering law enforcement should do as they are told and not try to argue then and there. However, a recent event in Virginia also suggests that police should not be barking out orders that require violating one of the orders. In that case, the driver was told to put his hands out of the window and also told to exit the vehicle. Try doing that with with a seat belt on while keeping your hands in full view of the officer. It cannot be done and to expect a civilian who has two police officers yelling orders with their guns trained on him to respond in a cool calm and collected manner is ludicrous. Most people would changing their underwear after that encounter.
If we are to give police officers the benefit of the doubt they must stop reflexively closing ranks when events like this happen. Police need to model the behavior of promoting fairness and due process and not take sides. We cannot expect members of the public to implicitly trust the motives of officers when some of the worst are not mustered out until they really do some damage. Police are human and subject to making mistakes but they are also more highly trained than the public on how to handle high stress situations so we should hold them to that higher standard as we would anyone working in a high risk / high stress job.
Great points. The police tasers have gun-type handles and triggers. I think is the third or fourth case like this I’ve read about.
https://www.google.com/search?q=police+taser+gun&client=firefox-b-1-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjG9cXhk_rvAhWPElkFHcAyD6sQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1366&bih=584
They made some tasers into a Glock-type grip frame so they would feel the same. Local law enforcement near me had a case of a reserve officer shooting a suspect he meant to tase. The agency had decided that swapping the positions of the pistol and the taser on the belt was more efficient. A reserve officer who was on one of his first shifts after the change, pulled the pistol (from where the taser had been for years) and shot the suspect.
Hooray for the efficiency experts.
I thought there were some that looked just like a Glock, but I can’t find it right now. Here is one with a pistol-like grip.
I wonder how many officers have tased subjects they intended to shoot….
Rashida Tlaib had weighed in on this incident:
jvb
And here’s the press doing their part:
Chief Tim Gannon of the Brooklyn Center Police Department said, “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.”
No Chief Gannon you damn fool, this shooting wasn’t an “accidental discharge”, it was an intentional discharge of the wrong weapon, it was pure negligence on the part of the officer.
Had Daunte Wright followed the officers instructions he would still be alive today; but nooooo, the anti-cop culture in the black community has instilled in the minds of ignorant people that they should be able to resist arrest without any consequences. Wright is #2 on the root cause of his own death list, #1 on the root cause list is the irrational culture that taught Wright that resisting arrest is acceptable behavior, #3 is the pure negligence of the police officer. Wright was a stupid person that directly contributed to his own demise.
I’m really, really sick and tired of all the bull shit involved when the police try to arrest a black person. When the police are figuratively hog-tied from doing their jobs the crime rate will increase and what will follow is a rapid increase of criminals being shot dead on the spot by people protecting themselves and since the social justice warriors are actively enabling (black) criminals and demonizing anyone that kills a (black) criminal guess who the these social justice imbeciles will go after.
Stupid people playing stupid games win stupid prizes!
This has happened numerous times. I recall the Oscar Grant case out of BART (moistly because I worked with and carpooled with his uncle a lot before this happened, so it hit close to home for me) but I can also recall a case in the past few years on YouTube that was more or less identical, only the guy did not die:
Note, that is not the incident from the other day, this was a couple years ago (queued to relevant time).
I think taser vs firearms triggers are slightly different, and all things being equal one should be able to tell the difference, but I am also pretty sure that when you are in the position of having to pull one out that you probably are not working on logic, rather muscle memory and I can imagine that you would easily make a mistake like this. I think it does speak to the training and suitability to the job for some of these officers though, but that is not a criminal issue.
I think we can and should have a conversation about pretextual stops and ask ourselves if this kind policing is worth it all things considered, but that time is not when you are pulled over for having an air freshener on your mirror. All these incidents (with very rare exception) involve some idiot fighting with the police. That will surely get you hurt, killed or charged with more serious crimes, and is almost never the correct response.
Sorry, that should have been BART, not bard. And the video I guess is age restricted, queue it up to about 6:55 to see the incident, it is really not graphic but I can imagine it may be disturbing to some.
I fixed that…