Police Failure: The American Way

Brooklyn Center is the new ground zero for how we don't get it right

Bad police work was underway from the start of the fatal encounter with Daunte Wright. (Brooklyn Center Police Department photo)

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If Brooklyn Center, Minn., Police Officer Kim Potter confused her pistol with her Taser, that’s a honking big mistake. But it wasn’t her only one.

That’s not surprising. Police inefficiency, often combined with police fear and police arrogance, regularly turns minor incidents into major, horrifying tragedies.

We are training cops to behave as if their most important consideration is saving their own lives. And to a great extent, we are training the wrong people.

Potter and her fellow officers blundered badly in the arrest Sunday of Daunte Wright, 20, before she even drew her Glock.

The officers tried to handcuff him right next to the open driver’s-side door of his car. So when he squirmed away from them, it was easy for him to slip right behind the wheel.

If standard procedure were followed, he would have been moved to the rear of the car or another safer place, where it would have been relatively easy to intervene if he attempted to return to the driver’s seat. He probably wouldn’t have even tried.

Potter, a 26-year officer who was reportedly working that day as a training officer, likely knew as soon as Wright twisted free that she had presided over a screw-up. Her best move at that point might have been to tell her charges to back off and let him go.

Admitting a mistake would have been preferable to fighting with a man suspected mainly of failing to show up in court on a misdemeanor. 

But she grabbed her Glock and pointed it at him, yelling “Taser, Taser, Taser,” and then pulled the trigger.  

A bullet came out instead of electrified wires. 

“Ah shit, I shot him,” she said.

Twitter: “If you can’t tell the difference between a gun and a Taser, maybe you shouldn't have access to either. Or a badge.”

Potter apparently agrees. She resigned Tuesday. She will reportedly be charged with manslaughter Wednesday.

There are some mistakes that are unforgivable, and shooting a man dead who doesn’t deserve it is probably one of them. 

Confusing your pistol with your stun gun is a reason. But it’s not a good reason. 

How could this happen? The bang-bang gun is kept on the dominant-handed hip, and the Taser on the other.

I talked to a couple of veteran cops who both said, of course it could happen. Under stress, mistakes become more likely. That includes grabbing the weapon that’s conveniently at your right hand. 

But Tasers are molded out of plastic in bright, clown-suit colors, aren't they? So how could you possibly make such a mistake?

I’ve undertaken police training for questionable journalistic purposes, and we were all given hard plastic training pistols in bizarre Day-Glo colors. Their appearance was as weird as Tasers, which are not always completely different-looking from conventional firearms. The shock guns are usually mostly black, with a few colorful accents. 

But why are Tasers, which police did without before 1993, being used so much anyway?

Stun guns seem to have become the tools of choice to try to resolve bad police work. They are now the law enforcement version of immersion blenders, frequently used by cooks to render the soup edible when the prep work has been slighted. 

Tasers usually come out of holsters when cops have failed to handle a situation well enough to peacefully affect an arrest.

They help subdue potential arrestees without causing bleeding, organ damage and bone splintering. But they often wind up being used to send a bolt of electricity into someone who is suspected of very little criminality. Over and over, sometimes.

Generally, it’s not unreasonable to say that we’re using cattle prods on people who are less ill-mannered than cows. They’re just not paying enough attention to the cops.

And the cops aren’t paying enough attention to the bottom line, which should be helping to create and preserve a peaceful and welcoming community. But neither are the prosecutors or the judges.

People like Wright don’t need to be arrested at all just because they haven’t gone to court. There’s something wrong with a system that can’t get people to court unless they’re dragged there.

Bobby Kennedy seemed to understand what was going on a long time ago. “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves,” he said in 1964. “What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”

We should insist that we have police who are better-prepared for their jobs than a lot of the ones we have hired before. Better-trained. Better-educated. Smarter.

More committed to justice and law, less to order.

They need to understand the challenges that people they deal with every day face every day, and what to do about them.

They should grasp something about the sometimes-marginal people they encounter other than that they’re afraid they might be killed by them.

Illinois State Rep. Jaime Andrade, Jr., D-Chicago, introduced a bill in February that would require all new police officers have a bachelor’s degree with a major or minor in social work. It hasn’t progressed much since. It should, and it should be followed by more education requirements for currently-employed officers.

If the police establishment doesn’t like it -- and that’s been indicated -- that in itself is a problem. We need police departments to be led by administrators who want to be part of solutions instead of a problematic status quo.

And we need police officers who want to be professionals fostering healthy communities instead of soldiers in a paramilitary force. 

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