Dead is dead.
Whether a Black man dies under the knee of a sneering white cop or from a gun of a white cop who said she thought she was firing a Taser, the Black man is still dead.
And while the murder of George Floyd and the shooting death of Daunte Wright, 20, involved completely different circumstances, the gulf between the two fatalities isn’t as wide as a judge made them out to be when she sentenced Wright’s killer to only two years in prison on Friday.
Kim Potter’s joke of a sentence came nearly two months after the former Minnesota police officer was convicted of first- and second-degree manslaughter for drawing her gun instead of her Taser and fatally shooting Wright during a traffic stop.
Prosecutors requested seven years and two months in prison, while Potter’s attorneys argued for a lesser sentence, since she had no criminal history and had shown remorse for Wright’s death.
“This is not a cop found guilty of murder for using his knee to pin down a person for 9 1/2 minutes as he gasped for air,” said Hennepin County Judge Regina Chu, who was referring to Derek Chauvin and the 22 1/2 years he was sentenced to for killing Floyd.
“This is a cop who made a tragic mistake. She drew her firearm thinking it was a Taser and ended up killing a young man.”
But there’s more in common between the two cases than the Minnesota county where they happened.
Both deaths involved cops with an ingrained and underlying bias that caused them to treat and approach Black people differently.
That same bias was on full display last week at a New Jersey mall where two white cops broke up a fight between a Black teen and a bigger white teen.
After pulling the white teen off the Black teen, the cops wrestled the Black youth to the floor and handcuffed him while his white opponent watched comfortably from a couch.
The good news here is that no one ended up dead.
In each of these instances, the cops were white and the victims were Black. But that’s not the only factor. What also makes these kinds of encounters racial incidents is that the victim is almost never white.
Potter apologized. She tearfully told the court and Wright’s family that she made a mistake.
“I am so sorry that I brought the death of your son, father, brother, uncle, grandson, nephew and the rest of your family,” Potter said.
”I do pray that one day, you can find forgiveness, only because hatred is so destructive to all of us.”
With good behavior, Potter can be out of prison in 16 months. She received a slap on the wrist for one reason, and one reason only.
“This is the problem with our justice system today,” Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, told reporters. “White women tears trump justice.”
