Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) blasted the police department of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, this week for suggesting that the police-perpetrated killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was merely an “accident.” At a press briefing on Tuesday, the police department released the body camera footage of Wright being shot in his car. In the video, Kim Potter, the officer who shot Wright (and has since resigned), is shown pointing her gun at close range at Wright while shouting “taser,” before shooting him. Police Chief Tim Gannon, who also resigned from the department on Tuesday, described Potter’s action as an “accident.” Ocasio-Cortez disparaged that assertion on Tuesday night, explaining that Wright’s death was emblematic of deeper problems with policing in the U.S. altogether. “Daunte Wright’s killing was not a random, disconnected ‘accident’ — it was the repeated outcome of an indefensible system that grants impunity for state violence, rewards it w/ endlessly growing budgets at the cost of community investment, & targets those who question that order,” the congresswoman wrote on Twitter. In a second tweet immediately following her first one, Ocasio-Cortez continued to explain her view, pointing out that no reforms could change the system of policing enough to prevent killings like these in the future. “Cameras, chokehold bans, ‘retraining’ funds, and similar reform measures do not ultimately solve what is a systemic problem,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That system will find a way — killings happen on camera, people are killed in other ways, retraining grows $ while often substituting for deeper measures.”
via truthout: AOC Blasts Police Department’s “Accident” Excuse in Daunte Wright’s Death