Do We Want Justice Or Revenge?
The Daunte Wright tragedy raises this question again
While I don’t think the two-year prison sentence received by ex-police officer, Kim Potter feels especially hardcore, I have no opinion at all if it is good enough, or hard enough. I will leave that one to the detractors.
But, as the writer, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written: “prison is utterly life-destroying.” It is according to many I know personally who never recovered from it.
Nothing will bring back Daunte Wright. It is sad as hell he was killed. If the judge had thrown the book at Kim Potter, it might have given a few rogue police officers have a bit of pause in their work, but, that I am not so sure. There is also nothing about Potter that remotely suggests she was a rogue officer.
Potter, based on the evidence, likely just made a horrible mistake. When Wright was killed, I was told when I said I thought it was an accident that I was a fool. Police officers do that all the time I was advised. Potter intentionally shot him, it was insisted, and then she acted like it was an accident with an act.
I find that hard to believe considering a veteran police officer tossed away her entire career, life, and her freedom by intentionally shooting Daunte Wright. The evidence against her was overwhelming and as Allison Gaines rightfully points out, she should have pled guilty and spared the world the trial.
Yet, I also think these moments are still a chance to fix things or to rethink how we do things. As soon as Potter’s two-year sentence was announced, outrage hit social media. It was the same in the sentencing of an ex-police officer, Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd barbarically. Chauvin received 22 years in prison; yet, to most Black Americans, that was not enough.
As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted after the Chauvin verdict, only in America is a 20-year sentence, not enough. Believe me, the torches come out a lot after sentencing in America. We are a draconian society.
In a few cases now, police officers, out of control, or who make terrible mistakes are finally be held to account for their actions. Trials are being held. It is not justice but it is not what we had just 10 years ago.
Those who get convicted get sentenced and then Black people call for more time, or, for the death penalty. Revenge. Black people want the police officers to be laid to waste like Black lives are laid to waste by them.
It is no different when it is a police officer who is killed either. In the PBS program, Philly D.A., a police officer is killed and the sister and mother of the officer want the killers to receive the death penalty.
The progressive Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krasner is already on record as opposing the death penalty. In the killing of the police officer, he does not pursue the death penalty much to the anger of the Philadelphia police unions and the two family members (other family members are against the death penalty). The men who killed the officer do get life without the possibility of parole. Krasner is described as anti-police afterward.
It is the other extreme.
Longer, more draconian sentences are not what people should want or hope for anyway. Do we want longer, more draconian sentences for Black people who break the law, or for anyone who breaks the law?
The true progressive, forward-thinking view is, none of that works. The whole point is America locks up millions of people and still executes people and that’s what we always do. It does not mean things are better or the system is juster.
The thing is, if Kim Potter was given the maximum years in a supermax prison chained to a wall for half the day, it would not fix the system that resulted in the unnecessary traffic stop and hard surveillance of a 17-year-old kid for nothing. Daunte Wright should be alive because society should make it so that he will survive or at least have a stronger chance to grow old.
Kim Potter is not the enemy anyway. She is (was) just the police. The police are part of a superstructure of racial and class oppression. As Alex Vitale has written — “the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people.”
Writer, Kristian Williams has called the police, “the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens.”
For African Americans, we want justice and we want the system that produces these deaths, dismantled.
I don’t think most of us want revenge. We really want the system itself to go. We said it at endless rallies and protests in 2020. All of us attended one. Defund the police! No justice. No peace.
We marched. We assembled peacefully. No one listened. No one is listening.
The song remained the same.
Those who are fine with the system, as it is, used that rallying cry to try to further entrench the system. They used lies and misinformation to discredit an actual valid call to fix how civic security is handled.
White supremacy and the racial and economic caste system endures. The police are not the problem. The caste system is the problem. Get rid of it.
Should Kim Potter have gotten more time? That’s the wrong question for me.
How does America change so it almost always delivers justice?
Hint: It is not with longer sentences. It is not with a police state in place. It is not with executions.
It is not by hanging onto your caste system like it is whiskey and you are an alcoholic.