Cops need to stop killing people pulled over for traffic violations

April 11, 2021, probably started out like any other day for Police Officer Kim Potter. She was a veteran of the force and had a trainee that day. She has said that under most circumstances, she would not have pulled someone over for an expired registration and having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror but she was training a rookie. But she did and that’s where things got crazy.

Daunte Wright had an outstanding warrant for a misdemeanor — he had been caught carrying a gun without a state license. When Potter tried to arrest him, he fled. In a lot of situations like this, police don’t fire at the person. They know where they live and can go pick them up later. In fact, many experts say the practice of firing at cars has been abandoned because it is ineffective and can result in bystanders being injured. There was no reason for Potter to try to shoot Wright with her gun or taser.

Now, this isn’t really about Potter and Wright, it is about how capricious the police are with the power they have. According to the Stanford Open Policing Project, 20 million drivers are pulled over every year. That’s about 50,000 each day. Over the course of the last five years, about 400 unarmed drivers were killed by police so the problem is bigger than these two people but I am going to focus on this for a…