According to the Brooklyn Center's police chief, the now-former police officer charged in the death of Daunte Wright meant to fire her taser when she killed the 20-year-old during a Sunday traffic stop in Minnesota.
Speaking Thursday on Boston Public Radio, former Suffolk County Sheriff and Massachusetts Secretary of Public Safety Andrea Cabral said she’s not yet convinced that the officer's defense is sincere.
“It was not an accident, in my view, based upon what is known in the recitation of the facts of this case,” she said during the Thursday interview, referencing the bodycam footage of the incident which shows Kim Potter had her gun drawn for several seconds before firing.
Potter, who had been on the force for 26 years and led its police union, was charged Wednesday with second-degree manslaughter. Still, protests in the Minnesota city continued into their fourth night, with around 500 people gathering to express grief and outrage over Wright’s death.
Cabral said defenders of Potter miss the bigger-picture issue of whether Wright should have been pulled over in the first place. In a call made to his mother moments before his death, he said the officers had pulled him over because of an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.
Cabral noted that while there is legal precedent for these kinds of stops, she said in the BPR interview that the pretext in the Wright case was "insane" and that a dangling air freshener “hardly obstructs a person’s view.”
The officers have said he was pulled over for an expired license sticker.
“There are millions of people driving with expired license tags,” Cabral said. “During the pandemic, of course you’re going to have a lot more people with those smaller things unattended to.”
She raised the question of whether these kinds of banal traffic stops only serve to create problems where there are none.
“Police officers routinely say that traffic stops are among the most dangerous things they encounter over the course of their career,” she said. “That’s a lot of the reason why they ask for so many armaments — so many firearms, so many methods of protection.”
“Then why,” she continued, “are you pulling over people for inconsequential things? Why are you putting yourself in that situation? If there’s no problem with the person’s driving, if their driving isn’t erratic, it’s not causing a potential risk to others... why do that?”
Cabral referenced data about traffic stops. “The number of people of color who are stopped with no contraband or any other problem found, especially versus the number of white people who are stopped and in particular where contraband is found, are staggering," she said. "The ratio is just staggering.”
Cabral is the former sheriff of Suffolk County and the former Massachusetts secretary of public safety. She is currently CEO of the cannabis company Ascend.
