The parents of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man shot dead by a white Minnesota police officer that superiors say mistook her handgun for a Taser, said on Tuesday they “could not accept” their son’s killing was a mistake.
Aubrey Wright and Katie Wright spoke to ABC’s Good Morning America after a second night of protests over their son’s death in a traffic stop on Sunday in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center.
The official explanation of officer Kim Potter’s actions, by police chief Tim Gannon at a Monday press conference, angered Aubrey Wright, who pointed to the officer’s considerable experience.
“I lost my son, he’s never coming back,” Aubrey Wright said. “I can’t accept that, a mistake, that doesn’t even sound right. This officer has been on the force for 26 years. I can’t accept that.”
Potter and Gannon resigned on Tuesday. But as the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) continues its investigation, Gannon’s description of a death caused by “accidental discharge” has come under scrutiny.
Though rare, instances of law enforcement personnel “mistaking” Tasers for service weapons have been recorded. Perhaps the most notable was the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant, a Black man, by a San Francisco Bay Area rapid transit (Bart) officer, Johannes Mehserle.
Mehserle claimed he meant to use his stun gun instead of his .40 calibre pistol when he shot Grant in the back as he lay on the ground. The officer was cleared of murder but convicted of involuntary manslaughter. His family settled a lawsuit against Bart for $2.8m. An award-winning 2014 film, Fruitvale Station, depicted Grant’s life and last day.
On Monday, the activist Cephus Johnson, Grant’s uncle, compared his nephew’s killing to that of Wright.
“Daunte Wright is another Oscar Grant, we seen this before and know exactly how it will play out, [an officer] claiming ‘I meant to use my Taser and accidentally pulled my … weapon.’ We watched it play out in court,” Johnson said in a tweet.
In another post, he included a photograph he said was the last Grant took on his mobile phone, appearing to show an officer, identified as Mehserle, standing over him and pointing a Taser, not a handgun.
The New York Times on Tuesday published research into incidents of officers “accidentally” using weapons in place of Tasers.
In one episode in 2015, Robert Bates, a volunteer sheriff’s deputy in Tulsa county, Oklahoma, killed Eric Harris, an unarmed Black man, then claimed at trial he mistook his firearm for a stun gun. Bates was released in 2017 after serving half of a four-year sentence for second-degree manslaughter.
In 2019, an identified Pennsylvania officer escaped charges despite admitting killing an unarmed man in a holding cell in the “honest but mistaken belief” he was firing his Taser. The district attorney said the killing “was neither justified, nor criminal, but was excused”.
A third incident referenced by the Times is eerily similar to the death of Daunte Wright, involving a female officer at a traffic stop whose reaction after realizing her mistake was also captured on video.
“Oh shit, I shot him,” Brindley Blood is heard to say after shooting a man fighting with a colleague in Lawrence, Kansas in 2018. The man survived and a judge dismissed a felony charge against Blood, of reckless aggravated battery.
Potter, after shooting Daunte Wright, is heard on police bodycam exclaiming: “Holy shit, I just shot him.” In both the Kansas and Minnesota incidents the officers shouted “Taser, taser, taser” as a warning – before firing their handguns.
A 2012 article in the Americans for Effective Law Enforcement journal detailed nine incidents of officers involved in incidents of “Taser confusion” between 2001 and 2009.
Training practices and the way officers carry their weapons are likely reasons for such incidents, some analysts believe, along with the pressure of stressful or dangerous situations.
Many officers holster their stun guns on their “weak” side, that of their non-dominant hand, and handguns on the side of their “stronger” arm. Gannon, the Brooklyn Center police chief, said his officers were trained to do this.
Tasers are much lighter, with shorter grips. They are usually brightly colored, to help distinguish them from handguns.
Some experts use the phrase “slip and capture” to explain an officer using the “wrong” weapon. The behavioral scientist William Lewinski, founder of the Minnesota Force Science Institute, said officers sometimes perform the direct opposite of their intended actions under stress, referring to how their actions “slip” and are “captured” by a stronger response.
Others discount the idea.
“There’s no science behind it. It’s a good theory, but we have no idea if it’s accurate,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police use of force.
Katie Wright, Daunte Wright’s mother, said she wanted to see “justice served” on the officer who killed her son, and for authorities not to treat the incident as a mistake.
“He had a two-year-old son that’s not going to be able to play basketball with him. He had sisters and brothers that he loved so much. He just had his whole life taken away from him. We had our hearts pulled out of our chests. He was my baby,” she said.
Potter, she added, should be “held accountable for everything that she’s taken from us”.
