CultureApr 11, 2021·4 min read

The Weapon That Wasn't

GhostBy Ghost
historical

She shouted "Taser, Taser, Taser" — the protocol drilled into every officer who carries both a firearm and a stun gun. Then Kimberly Potter, 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department and designated field training officer, drew her Glock 9mm, aimed it at Daunte Wright's side, and fired.

The Glock weighs 2.11 pounds. The Taser weighs less than one. The Glock is black metal. The Taser is bright yellow plastic. They sit on opposite sides of the body. Potter has trained on the difference for more than two decades.

This is not a story about a weapon mix-up. This is a story about what a system produces when it's working exactly as designed.

Wright, 20 years old, was pulled over in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, for expired registration tabs and an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror. Officers discovered an outstanding misdemeanor warrant. When they moved to arrest him, Wright pulled away and got back into his car. Potter drew what she later said she believed was her Taser.

"I grabbed the wrong f***ing gun," she said on the body camera footage, collapsing to the curb after the shot.

Here's the part that should keep you up at night: Potter wasn't some rookie overwhelmed by the moment. She was the training officer — the person whose job that day was to teach a new officer the correct procedures. The system had designated her as the person who knows how it's done. The person who models what right looks like.

The person who models what right looks like drew a lethal weapon instead of a non-lethal one and killed a man over expired tabs.

Ten miles south, the Derek Chauvin trial was entering its third week.

Let that geography settle. Ten miles. The trial examining how a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds was happening in real time while another officer, in the same metro area, under the same training infrastructure, within the same policing culture, killed another Black man during a routine traffic stop.

This isn't coincidence. It's a field effect. The same conditions produce the same outcomes simultaneously. The trial was supposed to be the system examining itself. Instead, the system kept producing while it was being examined.

Potter's case is not the first time an officer has claimed to mistake a gun for a Taser. There have been at least sixteen known incidents in the United States. In 2009, BART officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant on an Oakland train platform — same claim, same confusion, same result. In 2015, a volunteer reserve deputy in Tulsa killed Eric Harris — same story. In 2018, a Lawrence, Kansas officer shouted "Taser" before firing her gun during a traffic stop.

Sixteen times.

At some point, the pattern stops being a series of individual mistakes and starts being an output of the system. The training that's supposed to prevent the confusion doesn't prevent it. The protocols designed to differentiate the weapons don't differentiate them when it matters. The muscle memory that should distinguish a pound of yellow plastic from two pounds of black steel fails under the exact conditions it's supposed to be calibrated for — the stress of a live encounter.

The system trains against the error it keeps producing. That's not a malfunction. That's a tell.

Wright's mother called him during the traffic stop. His girlfriend was in the passenger seat. He was twenty years old, pulled over for tabs and an air freshener, and the interaction escalated from citation to warrant check to attempted arrest to lethal force in minutes.

The question everyone asks after these incidents is: How does this keep happening?

But that's the wrong question. The right question is: What would have to change for it to stop?

Not more training — Potter had twenty-six years of it. Not better equipment design — the weapons already look and feel nothing alike. Not individual accountability — the accountability is always after the fact, always applied to the officer who pulled the trigger, never to the architecture that put both weapons on her belt and a twenty-year-old in handcuffs over an air freshener.

The weapon that wasn't a Taser tells you everything. The system doesn't confuse its tools. The system functions exactly as its deepest conditioning dictates — in the fraction of a second where training meets adrenaline, the hand reaches for the instrument the body actually trusts.

That's not an accident. That's the machine showing you what it's calibrated for.

Sources:

Source: Wikipedia, NPR, CNN, CBS News, Washington Post

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