A person’s life can turn on a dime, for better or for worse. One action or one happenstance can forevermore change a life’s direction, and doors that you never knew existed can swing open — or in the tragic instance of former police officer Kim Potter, doors are now slamming shut, starting with the literal one of a prison cell. She’s on the other side of the system now, charged with second-degree manslaughter in the shooting of Daunte Wright. NPR:
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced the arrest. The Washington County Attorney’s Office will announce charges later this afternoon. Potter is currently being held at the Hennepin County Jail. […]
Under Minnesota law, a person is guilty of second-degree manslaughter if they cause the death of another through “culpable negligence” and “[create] an unreasonable risk, and consciously [take] chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.” The charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine. […]
It is rare — but not unheard of — for a police officer to confuse their Taser with their gun. Multiple such shootings have occurred in the years since Tasers have become commonly carried by police. Handguns and Tasers differ in a number of ways; handguns are heavier and made of metal, while lighter-weight plastic Tasers are often brightly colored to help set them apart. Most police departments, including Brooklyn Center, require their officers to carry their Tasers on their non-dominant side to help avoid confusion.
In most cases, officers who say they mistook their gun for their Taser have not faced criminal charges.
One high-profile exception was in the 2009 case of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old Black man who died after being shot in the back at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, Calif., by a BART police officer who later said he’d meant to use his Taser on him. That officer, Johannes Mehserle, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter — the California equivalent to Minnesota’s second-degree manslaughter charge — and ultimately served 11 months in prison.
Having held both a taser and a gun in my own hands, I cannot fathom how anybody of normal intelligence, let alone a trained peace officer, could mistake one for the other. It is beyond me. But apparently it happens. The other thing I can’t get my head around is that Potter had to have taken the safety off of the gun to have fired it. How would that not alerted her to what she was holding, if she was initially confused?
This is going to be some strange case as it continues to unfold.
It is rare — but not unheard of — for a police officer to confuse their Taser with their gun.
No, she was not mistaken, this is her alibi, weak… but it is.
Regarding the safety, with Glocks which are now pretty much standard with LE a safety in the form you are thinking of isn’t there. Yes, Glocks have a safety (a big deal is made about multiple safeties in fact) but it’s kind of misleading because the safeties on Glocks are PASSIVE safeties.
I can hear you and others saying “What the hell are you talking about?” It’s confusing, and to the point of confounding to be sure so let me try to explain.
For those familiar with handguns revolvers have no safety button or lever, although in a sense a single action revolver does have an ACTIVE safety because you have to pull back/cock the trigger to fire it. With a double-action revolver you only have to pull the trigger. The first part of the trigger pull cocks the hammer and the second lets if fall and strike the back of the firing pin cause the handgun to fire. It take a stronger trigger pull which isn’t always smooth.
Semi-auto handguns of more traditional function like the old military .45 (the M1911) or the Browning HI-POWER (what most people fifty or older saw State Cops carry back in the days when local LE had revolvers and “staties” had the “cool” semi-autos) or other semi-auto handguns had/have either a button on the back of the trigger guard you push to unlock the trigger or a lever up on the back of the slide that you had to push down/forward to allow the gun to start firing. This is what’s called an ACTIVE safety, a button you have to deliberately push over or a lever you must deliberately move to allow the gun to fire. In addition, semi-auto handguns (these older ones) also come in single and double action mechanisms. In the case of the old Army .45 or the HI-POWER which are single action in addition to disengaging the safety you also had/have to cock the hammer for the first shot. The action of the slide ejecting the spent round and chambering a fresh round cocks the hammer for subsequent shots. But the point is that you can’t just pull on the trigger with most (not all, but most) of the old-school semi-autos. You had/have to specifically disengage a safety device before pulling the trigger.
With training and practice, a person can learn to disengage a safety and also (with a single action) cock the hammer after removing a semi-auto from the holster and raising it up to point at a target. Despite my inexperience with handguns when I joined the Marines I practiced some and quickly learned how to do it. (I made sure to learn properly, as in NOT to start clicking off the safety and cocking the hammer until the gun was well clear of the holster! Alas, not everyone is as careful) Again however the point is that at least one ACTIVE step has to be taken before pulling the trigger.
It’s true that the passive safety systems in Glocks makes the chances of them going off if dropped or mishandled (as in fumbled with) virtually impossible because it take steady BACKWARDS and only straight backwards pressure on the trigger (literally pulling the trigger) to disengage all (up to three as I recall) passive safeties. Still, one only has to pull the trigger to get the gun to fire and that (for me at least) is a problem. Despite the speed and smoothness I wrote that one can acquire with practice to disengage an active safety it still has to be done and somewhere in a person’s mind that fact is buried – a sort of mental safety related to the rule of don’t point a gun unless you intend to shoot. Cops in the old days using the old fuddy-duddy handguns still were too quick to shoot, but we’ve made it even easier.
I wrote yesterday about what adrenaline can do to a person and still maintain that the obvious weight difference (when calm) between a Taser and well over two pounds of loaded Glock is apparent but not so much when adrenaline is pumping. However, it seems that as with most LE depts. this one’s Tasers are brightly colored and this wasn’t a yank it and fire it situation. From that cop’s own body cam it was clear that her handgun was aimed on the victim for a good couple of seconds and SOMETHING in her mind should have registered that as she was shouting Taser, Taser that what she was holding was the wrong fucking color! Either it was a damned near life-threatening amount of adrenaline pumping through her system (enough for her own trip to the ER) or she flat-out panicked.
It also blows my mind that she was a TRAINING OFFICER! If a Training Officer can be that overwhelmed by adrenaline or panic in a setting where she had other officers doing the actual arresting (IOW she wasn’t all on her own with a big ole ass guy like me on a deserted street in the middle of the night and fighting like hell) then that Town Council and Mayor needs to have an outside expert do a deep, DEEP dive into the Police Department’s standards and (ongoing after the Academy) training.
Anyway, I bet when you think of handguns and safeties your experience is far enough back that what you handled were older models of handguns that had ACTIVE safeties rather than these newer ones that have become all the rage – in part because they DON’T have ACTIVE safeties!
IMO, if police officers would stop escalating traffic stops when the drivers are African-American, then these issues would be moot. As for the officer who shot the young man, I watched the footage leading up to the murder, and she was acting hysterically, yelling and shouting at that poor young man. As far as I’m concerned, she should’ve left the police force years ago. This has to STOP!
She inserted herself into that situation, making it more chaotic and giving Daunte the opportunity to try to get away. She created the setting for that to happen.
She has been released on $100,000 bond. I read she was offered two choices: $100,000 bond with no conditions, or $50,000 bond and surrender her passport and be on house arrest. She chose no conditions.