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.

Police interactions with citizens

I am not going to comment directly on the killing of Daunte Wright in Minnesota. When such tragedies occur it is best to give justice at least a fighting chance to work itself out, for all involved. But it does offer an opportunity to point out an idea which I first heard in libertarian circles and which deserves greater thought.

Why was the young man pulled over? As I understand right now, the license plate on the car he was driving was out of date. Upon being pulled over it was noted that he had things dangling from the rear view mirror, an offense in Minnesota. Then it came out that he was wanted on a gross misdemeanor warrant. I do not know what that is or what it was for. Any way you slice it, it's three issues which the police had to consider in that particular situation.

So my question becomes, and this is an idea I've gleaned from libertarian circles as said, how could so many issues arise out of what appears to have begun as a simple traffic stop?

We have tons of laws, rules, and regulations in this country, and I certainly am not going to argue for abolishing all of them. But I have to wonder if maybe we ought to get rid of a great many, in part because every such dictate of government gives officials, in this case police officers, more power to look more intimately into what may just be singular events. They end up digging deeper searching for heinous activity. Each law, rule, and regulation grants somebody, almost always somebody with the power of government behind them, the ability to escalate a situation from something rather cut and dry, even mundane, into a situation where someone whether officer or civilian can get hurt physically or personally (in terms of ruined lives). 

Excess rules and regulations open the door for increased interaction between government and citizen. When there are more possible interactions then of course we're going to have more situations like the one in Minnesota recently. As such, I wonder if the real issue here is too much government. I do believe that at least some of the time, it is.