The shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, has spawned another cycle of talking points about police and racism, but nobody actually wants to have the difficult discussions about either issue.
Liberals have retreated to their calling cards, blaming the shooting on racism. Some conservatives, such as pundits Tomi Lahren and Charlie Kirk, focus on the fact that Wright was resisting arrest. Both groups seem intent to ignore the difficult truths at the core of this situation.
Wright should not have been trying to flee while he was being arrested. By resisting arrest, he put himself and everyone nearby in a dangerous situation, and it ended tragically.
And no, that does not lift the responsibility from the officer over her inexcusable mistake. Wright would be alive today if he hadn’t tried to flee, but he would also be alive if the officer had not inexplicably confused her firearm for a Taser. One wrong does not cancel out or justify the other, and those ignoring one or the other are failing to address this issue with the gravity it deserves.
There isn’t some magic reform that could have prevented this. Something like requiring police officers to have a college degree would not prevent a 26-year veteran of the police force from somehow forgetting where her taser was. The mayor of Brooklyn Center now thinks officers should not be armed during traffic stops, which is a great way to make the situation more dangerous, not less.
There is also no evidence that this had anything to do with race, unless you believe the killing was a deliberate act, not the accident that prosecutors now allege. Officers pulled Wright over for having expired tags when they then discovered he had an outstanding warrant for failing to appear in court on charges that he was illegally in possession of a firearm and had fled from the police. That’s a perfectly good justification, regardless of race, for pulling someone over and arresting them — and for taking the additional precautions that go with a potentially armed suspect known to flee from police. There is no evidence of racism here, but that didn’t stop an NBC News piece from declaring that “driving while black may have been his ‘crime.’”
There’s also no evidence that racism was involved in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, even though that instantly became the dominant narrative. The broader narrative, that black people are singled out and disproportionately killed by white police, is also not backed up by data. That doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist among some police officers, that black people aren’t harassed or confronted in disproportionate numbers, or that some police responses are unjustified. But racism is not the overarching, omnipresent force in policing that some such as Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib make it out to be. Her position becomes untenable when its proponents ludicrously contend that Michael Brown, killed in the act of assaulting a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and trying to take his gun, was just a victim of “systemic racism.”
And it isn’t as easy as simply obeying police instructions, either. Philando Castile was killed by a police officer who panicked after Castile informed him he had a firearm in the car while trying to follow the officer’s instructions to produce his driver’s license. After being told to crawl toward officers in an Arizona hotel, an unarmed Daniel Shaver was shot while trying to keep his shorts from falling off. (If you hadn’t heard about that one, it’s probably because Shaver was white.) This sort of thing happens way too often, and no one wants to talk about how police in the field can be so jumpy or badly trained that they would shoot someone who is, by all appearances, genuinely trying to comply.
The fact is, these discussions are difficult, and they don’t fall into any easy category. It isn’t as simple as attributing all police action to “systemic racism” or saying that resisting arrest is all that matters. This issue does not fit into simple political narratives, and it should be treated with the seriousness it deserves.
