On Sunday night, only ten miles from where Derek Chauvin is on trial for killing George Floyd last May, another cop killed another Black man, this time twenty- year-old Daunte Wright. Wright was pulled over for a license plate registration violation, and cops claim the officer thought she was firing her taser, not her gun.
But what kind of cop – one with 26 years’ experience – can’t tell a gun from a taser? How ineffective does their training have to be to even make that mistake possible? How do cops kill another Black man while only ten miles away the attention of the world is riveted on their behavior in an earlier killing? What type of “justice” system takes a year to find a cop guilty even with video clearly showing him kneeling on a man’s neck for more than nine minutes? What kind of abusive, racist system is this?
Daunte Wright’s mother said, “He had a 2-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.”
Cops are there, they say, to maintain “law and order.” It’s the law and order of the rich and powerful. And, in this country, that means it’s racist. Cops will, because of the system they swear to protect, continue to find themselves in conflict with poor, working class people – many of them Black and Brown. It’s not just a few rotten apples or poor training. It’s the whole system!
