I don’t need to see the video to know that there’s something fundamentally wrong with a justice system that responds to vulnerable Black and brown youth as threats that need to be neutralized. I really never need to see another police murder video to know that we do not need armed policemen to keep us safe — we need abolition.
But there’s always another police murder video. On Sunday April 11, Officer Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran of Minnesota’s Brooklyn Center Police Department, shot and killed a 20-year-old Black father, Daunte Wright, during a traffic stop.
It happened just 10 miles north of Minneapolis, where former Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin is currently on trial for the murder of George Floyd, which happened less than a year ago. Now THAT was too soon.
And now, millions of Americans who share Zorn’s liberal view of police as inherently good and unbiased people with panic-inducing and life-threatening jobs are trying to convince us that Wright’s outstanding warrant for an illegal weapon possession and fleeing police — which he likely knew nothing about because the notice was mailed to the wrong address — and his attempt to resist arrest warranted Potter’s use of violence.
They want us to believe that there is nothing malicious about a duly trained agent of the state admittedly reaching for a taser, though “accidentally” grabbing a gun, in an attempt to cripple a young man who posed absolutely no threat to her or anyone else on the scene. But we know better.
Remember last month when a white 21-year-old by the name of Robert Aaron Long was pulled over and arrested without injury after fleeing the scenes in the Atlanta area where he murdered eight people? Or last summer when the 17-year-old white supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse walked right past police vans while carrying the rifle he had just killed two people and injured another with during a protest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Or when officers in Charleston, South Carolina bought Burger King for 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof after he shot and killed nine Black congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during evening Bible study. We know that the racially disparate outcomes of policing are systemic.