Officer Who Fatally Shot Daunte Wright With ‘Accidental Discharge’ Is Identified

The police officer said to have fatally shot Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man killed in what started as a traffic stop on Sunday, has been identified as Kim Potter.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in a statement on Monday evening described Potter as a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center, Minn., Police Department, now on administrative leave.

The department offered no other details about Potter’s career, saying, “Further personnel data are not public from the BCA under Minnesota law during an active investigation.​”

However, a report from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office dated Aug. 5, 2020, indicates that at the time Potter also served as the Brooklyn Center Police Union president.

Police officials called Wright’s death the result of an “accidental discharge” of a gun by a police officer.

OFFICER WHO FATALLY SHOT DAUNTE WRIGHT WITH ‘ACCIDENTAL DISCHARGE’ IS IDENTIFIED, BECKY SULLIVAN AND VANESSA ROMO

OPINION: To Lessen Police Violence, Remove Cops From Traffic Stops

The largest predictor of police violence in America is not poor training, lack of discipline, or militarization. The largest predictor is simply contact with the police — and the most common contact Americans have with police is traffic stops. There are at least 20 million traffic stops per year in the United States. Racial bias pervades traffic enforcement, enabled by its largely discretionary nature; there are more drivers speeding and violating other traffic laws than police have the capacity to pull over and ticket, so who are police disproportionately targeting? People of color.

TO LESSEN POLICE VIOLENCE, REMOVE COPS FROM TRAFFIC STOPS, ALESSANDRA BIAGGI

Inside 100 million police traffic stops: CONTINUE READING: De-Gun the Police: A Reader – radical eyes for equity

Last June, after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the Washington Post reported that school districts across the United States suddenly felt obligated to take seriously the warnings from civil rights organizations about problems when school districts hire armed police as so-called “Student Resource Officers”:

“For years, civil rights activists have worked to remove police officers from the nation’s public schools, arguing that they pose a greater risk to students of color than the intruders they’re supposed to guard against. But in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a shift that seemed impossible only a few weeks ago is underway: Several major school systems have canceled their contracts with police, and others are mounting pressure to do the same.” School districts named by the Post last June included: Minneapolis, Portland, Denver, Oakland, and West Contra Costa Unified School District in California.

Now, the New York Times reports that last week another large school district, the Los Angeles Unified School District, approved a plan to eliminate a third of the armed police guards in the city’s public schools: “After a months-long push by students in the nation’s second-largest public school system, leaders in Los Angeles approved a plan on Tuesday to cut the district’s security force by a third, joining a growing number of cities that have reduced the presence of police officers in school hallways… The vote on Tuesday… would also ban the use of pepper spray on students and divert $25 million to programs supporting students of color. It was the result of months of meetings on how best to reconfigure public safety in the district, which serves about 650,000 students… The plan… eliminates 70 sworn officers, who have arrest CONTINUE READING: Another School District Ends Contract with City Police for Security Guards: Will Improve Counseling and School Climate | janresseger

In many large urban school districts, there are more security employees than counselors. In the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) system, for example there is one security guard for every 147 students, while the counselor-to-student ratio is 1:217. In addition, based on 2015-16 data, Groeger et al. (2018) found that Black students in DCPS were 15 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers (nationally, Black students were four times more likely to be suspended). In short, many students are not getting the emotional and mental support they need as they go through our schools. Instead, as exemplified by these staffing ratios, too many students are affected by punitive, militaristic methods of discipline, which may not only have negative consequences for the students who are disciplined, but for their peers as well (Perry and Morris 2014).  

A commonly used discipline approach, which used to be known as “zero tolerance,” was to discipline all students who didn’t follow the expected “rules.” Zero tolerance policies proliferated in public schools as a reform to help manage student behavior, using a “quick fix” method. Weaver and Swank (2020) define zero tolerance as “policies…[that] include exclusionary practices (i.e., office referral, suspension, expulsion) that involve the removal of the offender from the context of the incident and isolating the student from others involved and their school community.”

Unfortunately, as Skiba et al. (2011) show, these policies have created negative experiences for students and have disproportionately affected Black and brown students. Because they are CONTINUE READING: Shanker Blog: Re-Imagining School Discipline: A Plea To Education Leaders | National Education Policy Center

Last May, a 15-year-old Black girl in Michigan known only by her middle name, Grace, was put in juvenile detention for not completing her homework. Teens not turning in their homework is hardly an anomaly. Other teens are scolded, lose marks or, at worst, get detention for this offence. But Grace was incarcerated. The difference? She’s Black.

Grace’s story is just one example of how the American education system and American policing tactics converge.

The education system has a dangerous obsession with rule-following for Black children that cuts short opportunities, just as policing has a dangerous obsession with rule-following for Black people that cuts short lives.

This is particularly evident in math class.

Black students often receive compliments in math class for rule-following. In lower-income schools (which are often predominately Black), students are encouraged to follow math rules and formulae without questioning the teacher or the math itself, leaving them no room to ask questions or screw up.

Teachers are more likely to judge their Black students’ math abilities based on non-academic qualities, such as behavior and physical characteristics. A decade ago, Common Core math was introduced to emphasize understanding over rote learning, but the delivery of standards varies across schools, classrooms and teachers, depending both on who is being assessed and who is doing the assessing.

Related: White and female teachers show racial bias in evaluating second grade writing

In higher-income schools (which are often predominately white), understanding is often prioritized over procedure, and students learn math in more abstract ways, such as understanding why one uses a certain formula, instead of just being told to use it “because that’s the formula.” They also are shown how these abstract concepts contribute to the higher CONTINUE READING: 

In Oakland, an Emphatic Yes; In L.A., Not So Fast

In Oakland and Los Angeles, thousands of protesters of all races and ethnicities spent days in the streets calling for an end to the school district-funded police forces that unfairly criminalize students of color.