April 13, 2021

The Cop Who Shot Daunte Wright Just Resigned

A protestor confronts police during a demonstration over the death of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.ImageSPACE/Zuma

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Kim Potter, the police officer who shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota on Sunday, has resigned, as has the city’s police chief.

Potter, a 26-year veteran police officer, repeatedly shouted, “Taser!” before firing one fatal shot into Wright’s car. Tim Gannon, the former police chief, said that Potter had mistakenly grabbed her gun instead of her taser.

Wright’s parents don’t accept that explanation. “I lost my son,” Aubrey Wright, Daunte’s father, said in an interview with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America today. “He’s never coming back. I can’t accept that.”

“I have loved every minute of being a police officer and serving this community to the best of my ability,” Potter wrote in her resignation letter, “but I believe it is in the best interest of the community, the department, and my fellow officers if I resign immediately.”

Watch Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott announce the resignations below:

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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