The incident in Brooklyn Center

Okay, today I will comment on the death of Daunte Wright.

Beyond the philosophic issues involved, and there certainly are a few, there are two things which strike me as the most salient issues with regard to the death of the young man. One involves the officer who fired the fatal shot while the other focuses on the young man himself.

Knowing next to nothing about weapons I'll admit up front that I may be wrong on what I'm about to say. But mistaking a taser for a gun strikes me as profoundly negligent. Perhaps in the heat of the moment it is an easy mistake to make. Still, police officers should be intimately aware of what weapons they have and where they are. And aren't they supposed to be trained to deal with precisely these kinds of heat of the moment events? Even if drawing her gun was a complete accident, even if it were wholly a mistake, it was a deadly one. A wholly avoidable one. I have to think she should be subject to some type of criminal prosecution.

Then there's the actions of the young man himself. It's going to sound almost trite or even flippant yet I will hold that it's obviously true: if he hadn't tried to run away, if he hadn't resisted, he would almost certainly (and I say almost because you never fully know when speculating) still be alive today. With that, all the injury to persons and property would not have happened. All he had to do, I say within reason, was cooperate. It's intellectually dishonest to argue otherwise. So what happened to him and the larger community was to some degree his own fault. Would the officer have even tried to draw her taser if he would have done what he was told?

In practical terms, that's where it stands so far as I believe. Take from that what you will.