Turning Point? Cop Who Shot Daunte Wright Quits, So Does the Police Chief

On tv they had a person who trained police to comment on the situation. He said police are trained to keep their tasers on the opposite side of their body as their gun. The gun goes on their dominant side and taser on the other, requiring an officer to reach across themself to pull the taser. I agree with your question about a taser not feeling like a gun at all. In my military experience I qualified with M-16, .45, .38 and shotgun. I also used to own a .380 Colt government special pistol. None of those would feel like a taser, from what I can see. Tasers appear to have a plastic case.

Since they seem to be causing so many deaths, maybe now would be a good time to take guns off the police and have them just use tasers. That would stop any confusion and reduce the death rate.

I’d like to know a lot more about this cop’s history. In the meantime I have a couple of observations, which are in part influenced by experience wearing a badge and making arrests way the hell back in another life during my Marine Corps days when even though I was a grunt I wound up attached to an MP unit. Tasers? No experience with them. Zip. As for handguns, I never once shot one until I became a Marine, but once I did I qualified expert (the Corps’ highest marksmanship rating) every time. It’s been quite a few years since I even handled one, much less owned one but again I think my experience is relevant.

My understanding of Tasers is that they are quite light in weight. Maybe a half pound or even less. A loaded semi-auto handgun however will typically weigh roughly two-and-a-half pounds when fully loaded. Give or take. Glocks have become all the rage with law enforcement over time, but for a semi-auto pistol I’d still choose the venerable Browning HI-POWER (9mm), the last firearm the legendary John Browning designed any day of the week. Fully loaded (13 rounds) it comes in at one kilogram as the design specs under which Browning got the contract demanded. That’s 2.2 pounds. Still several times the weight of a Taser from what I understand, and again most Glocks actually weigh a little more – 30 ounces give or take but they also have fifteen round magazines. A couple more bullets.

In any ordinary setting a person can be blindfolded and pick up a Taser and a loaded Glock and easily tell the difference in weight. Even in normal duty circumstances it would be noticable, especially since they are worn (and therefore drawn from) different places on a cop’s belt gear. However, when adrenaline kicks in things change. Two or three pounds of handgun doesn’t feel like much of anything when drawn and aimed when the adrenaline is pumping, which is why cops are supposedly put through refresher trainings. Exactly to help them make such distinctions. And in this case we are talking about someone with 26 years of experience. Someone who’s surely been in plenty of arrest situations including some where she drew her weapon. So the effects of adrenaline should, and I emphasize the word “should” be lessened in such a person. Especially for an arrest during what would seem a routine, although for dubious purposes traffic stop where the victim was already out of the car and other officers were the ones hooking him up with handcuffs.

So the question in my mind is why was her adrenaline running so high in the first place? It’s not like she was some State Trooper making a single cop stop on some highway at night where for one reason or another an arrest seemed warranted! I can’t help but think that like so many other cops the “big black guy” syndrome kicked in. I can honestly say that was never a factor for me because on a military post virtually every drunk (or someone who’d been fighting or for some other reason) that had to be handcuffed and arrested was someone perfectly capable of fighting back and fighting back hard. And more often than not they did. Yet in all my time in that duty post not a singe shot was fired at someone during an arrest. Not one. Nor over the fence at Ft. Meyer, or any other post in the DC area. Or even down at a full blown base at Quantico!

And thirty plus years ago we didn’t get anywhere NEAR the initial or ongoing training that civilian cops have been getting and for a good long while now.

Right now I’m trying to keep an open mind as to the possibility of this cop panicking and making a horrible, tragic mistake that cost a man his life. However, it’s hard not to believe the key factor was the general “us vs. them” mentality that has taken over policing in recent decades combined with the BIG BLACK GUY (even when the non-white guy isn’t even all that big) syndrome. A syndrome in which the person being stopped and arrested is ASSUMED to have superhuman strength and will at any moment erupt into a cop killing rage until they are beaten down and subdued. And if they kill that person they feel safe in the “I was in fear for my life” defense that has worked so many times for so many cops in the past. What’s truly fucked up is that so many cops do in fact experience actual fear at dealing with a black or brown person, especially if that person is male. It’s an irrational fear, but it’s there and it’s there because that is the culture cops have been conditioned to believe is reality.

As a result what should be only a slight bump in adrenaline that almost anyone would feel when in a confrontation (think about the last heated argument you had with someone – where when things quieted down your heart was beating a little fast) vs. a full-on adrenaline rush (think narrowly avoiding a car crash as significant speed). We have a reasonable expectation that cops, especially in well-funded city departments get enough training to be able to work through that kind of thing. And for damned sure that should be true of someone with literally decades on the job.

Sadly, those same decades have included conditioning of another kind which includes a lessened concern for the lives of certain types of people. We see it play out again and again in the age of body cameras and smart phones but it’s not new. I do however think that as the legal concept of qualified immunity became the controlling factor around the country an existing problem has grown worse.

At best this cop screwed up in the most tragic of ways. However I can’t help but wonder at the ingrained culture in law enforcement played a role in creating this situation – a culture of “better to be tried by twelve than carried by six” that is literally treated as a joke among too many cops because they know they can count on qualified immunity and the “I was in fear for my life” defense making even the possibility of being put on trial (much less convicted) virtually non-existent.

Why are police not trained that if there is a valid reason to shoot , then shoot to stop rather than shoot to kill. A fleeing suspect cab be stopped with a shot to the leg, rather than a shot to the center of the back. And who shoots someone in the back, anyway? I oppose police shootings, especially since there are so many more people of color who are shot and killed. But if there is a valid reason to shoot, why is it always to kill? Use the taser. Why always the gun?

There is no way that she could have thought she was holding a taser rather than a gun. Any cop who cannot tell the difference should not be on the force.