What the fuck is going on in Minnesota?

And what the fuck is going on in Virginia?

You would have to have spent the last 24 hours in the bottom of a mine in the Australian outback to have missed the latest encounters between Black citizens and the police forces famously sworn to “serve and protect” them.  Both incidents, one deadly and the other merely unlawful and disgusting, were, amazingly enough, caught on police body cams.

Twenty-year-old Daunte Wright was killed by a single shot from an officer’s Glock handgun during, of course, a traffic stop in the town of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota on Sunday, only a few miles from where George Floyd was killed.  Police said Wright was either driving with an expired tag, or he had an “air freshener” dangling from his rear view mirror which they claimed, without evidence or even a modicum of reason, was interfering with his view of the road.  How an air freshener gets in the way of a driver seeing out of the windshield or in the rear view mirror I assume will be an issue to be explored at another time. 

The expired tag can be disposed of easily enough.  Police could have written down the tag number and looked up the registrant and issued a summons, or ticket, by mail.  Police claim that after they pulled Wright over, they ran his tag and discovered there was a bench warrant on him. As seen on police body cam footage released today, no less than three officers approached Wright’s car, two from the sides and one from behind, and Wright was ordered to get out of the car.  At that time, the body cam footage shows, one officer attempted to handcuff him…because of course when you’ve stopped a driver for an expired tag or an errant air freshener, and you discover he’s got a warrant, you must handcuff the dangerous violator.

The body cam footage shows that all three officers involved in the stop were white.  Daunte Wright, as you have probably concluded by now, was Black.

Wright apparently did not want to be handcuffed.  Who would, having been stopped for a traffic violation?  He wrenched himself away from the officer and attempted to get back into his car with his girlfriend, who was riding in the passenger seat.  At that point, the third officer, who had had nothing to do with Wright up until that point, approached the car with her gun drawn and yelled at Wright, “I’m going to tase you,” and then yelled out “Taser!  Taser!  Taser!” and discharged her handgun, killing Wright with what the police chief described as “a single bullet,” as if to emphasize the officer’s restraint.

The police chief, Tim Gannon, then attempted to exonerate the officer who discharged her weapon killing Wright by saying, “This appears to me, from what I viewed, and the officer’s reaction and distress immediately after, that this was an accidental discharge that resulted in a tragic death of Mr. Wright.”

He went on to explain that officers in his department are required to carry their handguns on their “strong” side and their tasers on their “weak” sides, presumably so they won’t be confused.  He then gave quite a speech about all the training his officers receive in the use of both weapons, handguns and tasers.

He wasn’t asked any questions about how the officer could have mistaken the two, so I’ll ask it.  Given that a loaded Glock handgun weighs 32 ounces, and a typical taser weighs 8 ounces, how the fuck can a trained police officer confuse the two, Chief Gannon? 

I can see one possible source of confusion.  I had a look at multiple websites for taser manufacturers and saw that every one of them is designed almost exactly like a handgun, with a handgrip nearly the same as the one on a Glock, a trigger guard and trigger – again nearly the same as a Glock – and a “barrel” style front of the taser from which the prongs are discharged, again, similar that on a Glock.  Here is a typical taser:

Here is a view of a Glock 19:

Why can’t a taser be designed to look like, say, a TV remote control, instead of a lethal weapon?  I think I know the answer.  It’s because of the militarization of the police in this country.  Even in their ordinary daily uniforms, they look more like soldiers going into combat than they do “keepers of the peace,” which is what they should look like.  When they’re outfitted in so-called “SWAT” gear, they look like stormtroopers from some kind of near-future dystopian nightmare.  Soldiers who went to war in Iraq had less body armor and weaponry than “SWAT” cops are armed with today.  It’s ridiculous, and as we have seen over and over again, it’s deadly.

You don’t have to be a genius to see where the killing in Minnesota is probably going.  The officer who shot Wright, currently suspended, will be fired.  An investigation of the incident will probably find that the shooting was accidental.  A prosecutor may decide to charge the officer with negligent homicide, or may not. 

But the facts surrounding the shooting as we now know them are all too familiar and all too disgusting.  Three white officers – not one, not two, but three – stop a Black driver for a minor traffic infraction.  Instead of taking the driver’s license and issuing a citation, they pull him from the car, the incident escalates, and he gets shot and killed. 

I’m sure nearly everyone reading this has been stopped for a minor infraction – failure to stop at a stop sign, driving over the speed limit, maybe an expired tag.  I don’t even have to ask the question to know the answer to how many were pulled from the car and handcuffed.

The second incident that came to light over the weekend was another traffic stop of a black driver, this time in Virginia.  Twenty-nine year old Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, was pulled over by two police officers, Daniel Crocker and Joe Guitierrez, allegedly because he did not have a license plate on his car.  Nazario had just bought the car, and a paper temporary plate was legally displayed in the car’s rear window.

Body cam footage of the incident shows Guitierrez ordering Nazario out of his car.  Nazario asks repeatedly what he was being stopped for.  Guitierrez does not answer.  Nazario says he is afraid to get out of his car, to which Guitierrez responds, “You should be.  You’re fixin’ to ride the lightning, son,” which is a “colloquial expression for an execution,” particularly a reference to death by electric chair, according to a lawsuit filed by Nazario against the police department of Windsor, Virginia.

Guitierrez repeatedly sprays Nazario with pepper spray, and pulls him from the car.  Both officers wrestle Nazario to the ground and handcuff him.  Guitierrez and Crocker apparently figure out that Nazario had a temporary license plate and that it was legally displayed and then attempt to back out of the whole thing by warning him that if he doesn’t remain silent, they’ll charge him with multiple crimes.

"There's no need getting this on your record," Gutierrez can be heard telling Nazario in body cam footage of the incident. "If you want to fight it and argue ... if that's what you want, we'll charge you, have you go to court, notify the commander, do all that."

The lawsuit filed by Nazario against the police department charges that he was subjected to a form of extortion in addition to being beaten, handcuffed, and pepper-sprayed – all for a minor traffic infraction that turned out to be not an infraction at all.

We are the only country in the world with a language that contains the phrase, “driving while Black,” and for this we should be ashamed of ourselves as a nation and as individual citizens. 

But who should be most ashamed are these police officers who in the face of one killing after another just keep on pulling their weapons on Black citizens in the process of arresting them for things they wouldn’t ever arrest a white citizen for and killing them for no reason at all.  We should call it what it is:  it’s lynching by police. It’s a stain on this country as profound as slavery, and as we learned again this weekend, it’s not going away.