What the mainstream media doesn’t tell you about Daunte Wright

Before October 27, 2018, he was a minor. Juvenile records are not available.

In August, 2019 he was charged twice, once for possessing/dealing marijuana, once for disorderly conduct. These are misdemeanors. He pled and was fined.

In November, 2019, he was charged with several counts related to criminal trespass. No further info available at this time.

Wright was charged with aggravated robbery on December 1, 2019 in Osseo, Minnesota. It is alleged that he choked a woman and threatened her at gunpoint for $820. If convicted on this charge, he would face as much as 20 years of incarceration. An arrest warrant was issued, and he was brought in. Wright’s bail was originally set at $100,000 with orders that he should not contact the victim or any witnesses, refrain from drugs and alcohol, and not have any weapons.

In June of 2020, he was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm and fleeing arrest.

Presumably because of the June firearms charge and the report of his probation officer, an arrest warrant for Wright was issued on July 30, 2020 for violating the terms of his bail on the felony robbery charge.

When he failed to make his court appearance on the firearms charge, yet another warrant for his arrest was issued on April 2, 2021. This was still in effect at the time of his fatal encounter with police.

His jury trial for the felony robbery charge was to start on May 24.

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For info:

Wright’s most recent Facebook account

The Hennepin County jail records also show that Wright faced some administrative procedure regarding aggravated robbery about two months ago. At the moment, it is not clear precisely what this is about.

——–

We should not attempt to justify his horrifying death, but neither should we misrepresent him or his situation. Because of the warrant(s), the police were correct in trying to bring him into custody, and because both of his recent arrests involved firearms, they were correct to assume that he could be dangerous. And he had every reason to flee, because he was attempting to avoid immediate incarceration that could have lasted as long as twenty years. Of course they completely bungled the situation. Wright was killed unnecessarily and it was fortunate that there were no other fatalities, because a panicking, desperate and fatally wounded Wright managed to plow into another vehicle as he tried to escape.

50 thoughts on “What the mainstream media doesn’t tell you about Daunte Wright

  1. Seriously, stick to celeb nudity as this thread has accomplished nothing. Just like political discussion on the interwebs the past 20+ yrs. No minds will ever be changed by political blogging. If anything, much like FB, twitter and other social media nonsense, it has only made the great divide in America worse, if possible.

    btw, as always, everyone is entitled to my opinion! 😮

    Yielding back the balance of my time …

      1. Having politically blogged consistently over a ten yr period at 538.com, et al notwithstanding ~ re: freedom of speech, just trying to save all of you from wasting your time. 😮

        btw, “facts” are usually determined in court and many times not even then. Many murders going unsolved every yr in America aside, OJ got away with murder and “they” had John DeLorean on video and he walked. Justice in the U.S. btw, OJ got off because he was a celeb more than his race.

        Lies, damned lies and statistics …

        Bottom line, over 400 yrs and systemic/pervasive racism still exists exacerbated even more by 24/7 cable news, brain dead yahoo, redneck, white nationalist social media and a totally ineffective federal govt. which can’t pass popular legislation like back ground checks, etc.

        The powerful warlords will always have total control over the ignorant/foolish serfs. Human nature much like systemic racism in America.

        But please, keep on keeping on!

        Have a nice day! 🙂

        1. TBH, shiloh, now you’re talking my language. Before, you weren’t. The part of this latest that still does not compute is where you try to save us from wasting our time. Everything we do or even can do, if taken in a certain context, is waste time. There’s no actual refutation of negative philosophies like solipsism, logical positivism or post-modernism, but to most of us, they’re dead cul-de-sac ideas. They’re all, well, defeatist takes. We get that there are productive uses of our time & energy. And then there’s time-wasting. Yet, for some reason, we keep getting married, having kids & all that other worthless stuff. Instead of gainfully contributing to the general welfare by fapping to porn 24/7 like we ought. We get it. So, thank you for the sage advice. And have a nice day. Somewhere else. Preferably.

    1. shiloh, you do know that is an argument for never discussing anything where the decision is not under the direct control of one of the participants of the discussion, right? It is also insulting, because it presumes that discussion never changes anyone’s mind. Speak for yourself.

    2. Well, there are some facts & opinions that we didn’t come to full agreement over & that we never were going to all agree on. But I’d say by & large it was a good discussion. Good points were made. Some facts were clarified. We were mostly civil. Not that all good conversation is civil. True, celeb nudity is the main focus. But this kind of talk here adds value. It’s one of this site’s strengths.

  2. I kinda wonder if there’s any more to the Lt. Caron Nazario incident. Like what happened before that stop that would cause these cops to go at him so hostile. They’re treating him like he’s armed and dangerous.

    And really, he didn’t listen to the cops. They repeatedly gave him instructions, and he didn’t do it, as if was expecting a conflict and wanted to get it on video to prove something. Granted, if he were white it probably would’ve gone down differently, but still he gave them a reason to escalate it.

    1. He ran for 100 seconds, which doesn’t sound like much but is a subjectively long time to not pull over after they hit the lights & sirens. Seems that town has a rep for fucking with black drivers, he was making sure he stopped somewhere well-lit.

      1. He didn’t run. He did what you were supposed to, what even the cops will tell you you’re supposed to, which is find a well-lighted area to pull over.

  3. I have no worthwhile opinion on the case involving Daunte Wright. But I would be curious to know how often the police investigate their own use of force and find any fault with it. It seems to me that it is very close to zero, but I don’t actually have any information on the subject.

    If it is close to zero, then I think there is a problem, because in an organization with as many people in it as all the American police forces put together, it is hard for me to believe that their rate of deadly mistakes would be close to zero. Humans are just too fallible for that. That would suggest they cannot be relied on to police themselves.

    Of course, I also have no idea how to police the police if they are not doing it themselves. Which would be to say I have no idea for solving the larger problem that faces us.

  4. Does his situation warrant the destruction of a city? You state he did not deserve what happened to him but what about all the destruction in his name? I am sure all the minority businesses and working people deserved to be punished as well. This is the type of thinking that causes this exact situation. If you state that it is only bad people doing this, then do not say that a few bad cops are a few too many. Obey the law, do not get hurt!

    1. If by “situation” you mean death, then no, that doesn’t warrant the destruction of a city. And no city was destroyed. But the day is long gone when they can just kill a guy, then get back to business as usual – and that’s OK. If that’s what it takes to stop the killing, so be it.
      I’ve lived here most of my life and fwald is right: if he was white he would be alive. That may not be strictly a fact, but it is true.

      1. That isn’t “true” – it’s just an opinion, and it’s one that seems completely unfounded to me. I think it would have gone down exactly the same way if he was a white man, had the same warrants out for his arrest and behaved the same way. It was his past and present behavior that earned him a tasing.

        BUT …

        Of course, I am assuming that the officer really meant to tase him. If she did indeed intend to kill him with a firearm, then I could come over to your side of the fence. I doubt it, though. My guess is that police have actually been walking on eggshells in that metro because the whole area is a tinderbox during the Chauvin case. I’m guessing that the officer was not pretending, but was truly surprised and horrified by what she had done.

        Of course that doesn’t make Daunte Wright any less dead.

        My question is this. In what way should the officer be held accountable? Let’s assume her story is true and she thought she was using a taser, which certainly seemed necessary in this case. If I accidentally step on the gas pedal instead of the brakes and run over a toddler, I can’t just walk away, can I? The same penalty I would have received, whatever that is, should also apply to her, should it not? I know nothing of Minnesota law. Is she guilty of something like “negligent homicide” or “negligent manslaughter”? Is there such a thing?

        Of course if she is lying and knew she was firing a revolver, then it’s straight up second-degree murder, isn’t it?

        (I don’t know of any way to determine her intentions, so I think that second-degree homicide would be impossible to prove in a court of law.)

        1. I just posted four links to videos of white men acting way worse than anyone we’re talking about, and they’re all alive.

          And we haven’t even mentioned Kyle Rittenhouse.

          1. Fwald. You can’t just say this person acted worse and wasn’t killed and have that mean anything. I’m sure there are plenty of black people that acted worse and are also alive. In this case, it appears that Potter intended to use reasonable force but made a tragic mistake so it makes even less sense to compare cases of people that acted worse than Daunte Wright. I have been hoping that Derek Chauvin takes the stand because I really want to hear what was going through his mind for those 9 minutes. I don’t necessarily think he will tell the truth, but I am curious what his story will be. With Potter, it was either an accident or premeditated murder. Unless evidence of a motive for Potter wanting Wright dead (a motive that was powerful enough that she would be willing to go to prison for up to 10 years) I have to accept it was an accident.

          2. I’ll object to equating non-lethal with reasonable. Pain techniques including electric shock & certain overused chemical weapons might be justifiable sometimes. But that should not be automatic. Tasing is dangerous. Even rubber bullets are far from benign. We need to use them with some reluctance. OTOH, I agree, this cop’s story does seem plausible to me.

        2. Potter (not Porter) is being held without bail on 2nd degree manslaughter. AKA involuntary. Also reckless, without legal justification, unintentional. She might well be convicted on that charge. A jury’s job is to decide on the facts. If no jury is tasked with deciding what the cop’s intention was, I don’t think we’re going to figure that out here.

        3. Scoopy: Did you see the body cam? Definitely not a revolver. Officer would’ve had to flip the safety. Heft is different from a taser. But a cop is used to her gun, no alarm bells necessarily go off. And, adrenaline. You wouldn’t notice a small amount of extra effort.

          1. I saw it. I can’t see how she could make that mistake, but I’ve never been on the front lines and I know nothing about weapons. Moreover I don’t know anything about the record of that cop, or her character, so I really have nothing worthwhile to add to that discussion.

            On the other hand, all of her verbiage indicates that she thought she had a taser, and I give her the benefit of the doubt by assuming she is not the Meryl Streep of Minnesota.

            I just don’t know. That would have to be sorted out by people who know about the weapons and about the kind of front-line adrenalin she must have experienced, as well as people who know about her character and record.

            I do know this: even if we assume she is telling the truth about the gun/taser confusion, she really fucked up big-time.

          2. You’re not wrong about that. I too give the officer the benefit of the doubt in this instance. It’s still moot. The charge being involuntary manslaughter, the cop’s intent isn’t at issue. Doubtless opinions will be divided forever.

        4. Scoopy: Negligent homicide is usually a synonym for involuntary manslaughter. I don’t believe negligent manslaughter is a thing. At least it’s not widely used.

          1. Thank you for that, Scoopy. Based on it, I now think the cop might not be convicted. Culpable & conscious are at least in play. Tasing is non-lethal & grievous injury isn’t expected. Normally.

            “*culpable* negligence whereby… creates unreasonable risk *and* *consciously* takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm.” (emphasis mine)

          2. BTW, the cops on the scene might’ve been informed of some or all of the facts that Scoopy’s research surfaced. That’s likely to have a bearing on the cop’s defense. All the more vindicating Scoopy’s coverage vs. the MSM. Wright was a *fugitive*. In his own mind & the cops both.

    2. “Does his situation warrant the destruction of a city?” Well, there it is: the stupidest thing I’ll read all day.

  5. I believe former officer Porter made a mistake. The alternative is that she decided to shoot Wright and deliberately said “taser, taser, taser” before firing and “holy shit I shot him” immediately after to make people believe it was a mistake. But she would have known that despite that she would lose her job and face prison time for involuntary manslaughter or at the very least criminally negligent homicide. She deserves jail time because their must be serious consequences for gross negligence by police officers that kills someone. But if the body cam recording didn’t exist, I’d find her story very hard to believe.

    Rep Rashida Tlaib says it is impossible to reform the police and we need to abolish them and also end all incarceration. That is just insane. But she is right in one sense. Completely eliminating excessive force incidents by police, including unjustified use of deadly force is all but impossible. That is because police officers are human beings that have flaws and make mistakes. All we can really hope to do is to increase screening, training, and supervision of police officers (including increased use of body cams) and to have real consequences for police misconduct. But in a nation of over 300 million people both mistakes and police misconduct will continue to occur. But I think the media does a disservice in the way it tends to focus only on incidents with minority victims and pretty much ignores white victims of police misconduct, including unarmed whites shot and killed by police. If all we hear about are minority victims it makes it much easier to believe the incidents only happened because they were minorities when that MAY not be the case.

    Several people have lost their jobs over this incident, but at least one didn’t seem to deserve it. The city manager was asked if he would immediately fire (then) Officer Porter and he replied that there was a process and that Porter was entitled to due process of law. That was just a fact because under the contract that had been negotiated with the police union certain procedures needed to be followed. But Porter had been immediately suspended pending those procedures. But because protesters were so enraged at the idea of due process he was fired by the City Council. One member of the council was reported to have said that the manager didn’t deserve to be fired but she was afraid of reprisals against her and her family. That is literally mob rule.

    1. Mayor wanted to fire police chief. Charter blocks that. Manager had to be fired. Council had banned use of tear gas. PD did not comply. It’s straightforward.

  6. Conservatives want to have their cake and eat it too. So, it’s always back the blue, because there could be a dangerous criminal out there and they get what they get when one ends up dead.

    Support the police, but at the same time, kiss the NRA’s ass and haven’t had any meaningful weapon legislation that’s in effect for at least 30+ years – despite the fact the US is by far the worst country in the world with this ‘problem.’ But any attempt to do even the SLIGHTEST research, funding, legislation to mitigate the issue like any other damn country in this world gets blocked. Try nothing and then be surprised when the same result happens.

    These are systemic issues that other countries have solved, yet this one fails on a basic level because Billy Bob in Bumfuck, Alabama likes to spray lead into wooded areas as his favorite past time on the weekend.

  7. Not that what I think is any more insightful but I take to heart what I’ve heard about life at the “front lines”: long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer horror. That is, I’ve experienced having the awareness to take a quick glance to be sure of the key details of a situation. When I’m cool. I still can’t be sure how I’ll be in the heat of battle. Different people are different & I don’t know that me too well. For all I know, everything will be a blur, my situational awareness will fly off into the jungle & whatever I do may be totally random. That’s why cops have to train. If they trained right, what they do in a pinch is exactly how they were taught. No different than, say, a tennis player’s shot selection. They don’t have time to think it thru. By the time they’re even aware there’s a choice to be made, it’s too late, they already hit the ball back. At least from what I’ve always heard when I took a gun class or talked weapons with friends who are into martial arts, most cops would be trained to keep their eye on the ball, meaning the action. Any time you look down or look away, something may happen that you won’t react to in time.

    My wild guess about Officer Potter of Brooklyn Center MN PD is facing a situation where she’d have either her gun or her taser drawn doesn’t happen every day. Her training takes over, she focuses on the task & muscle memory does the rest. If she doesn’t have enough flight hours armed with both a taser & her gun, which guaranteed she always has with her, her hand will automatically go for the gun. Or so I imagine.

    1. Frankly, you don’t seem to understand the definition of a fact.

      Your fact is an opinion, of course, and I don’t know whether I agree with it or not. It’s possible, but not certain. What caused the cops to go ballistic was his attempt to get away. So we can be much closer to certainty with another opinion: if he had not tried to escape, he would be alive today. If a white guy had done the same thing Wright did … well, I don’t know.

      1. “If he had not tried to escape, he would be alive today”. Definitely your very narrow opinion. Philando Castile would say hi, if he could.

        1. I think it is extremely reasonable to believe Wright would be alive if he hadn’t resisted arrest. That is true of just about every incident where an unarmed suspect is killed by the police. I’d say Philando Castile was the exception that proved the rule, but he was actually armed. But Castile wasn’t resisting and apparently did everything right. He was the victim of a police officer that panicked. Probably the only reason that incident didn’t get even more coverage than it did was because the officer that killed him wasn’t white. That is of course my opinion. But I think most people would agree that suspects are much much less likely to be killed by the police if they comply and do not resist arrest. I am pretty confident that it is a fact that statistics would bear out.

          1. Nature Mom: I said suspects complying with police officer are much less likely to be killed than those resisting. I didn’t say it couldn’t happen. It seems much more likely to happen in or around Minneapolis though. MN needs to do a much better job of training police officers. Or maybe it’s something in the water. A little over 20 years ago, I went to Brooklyn Park for 3 days to conduct depositions. They had the worst water I have ever tasted. But most likely they need better training.

      2. Scoop, sorry for the flack you are taking here, I appreciate the work you did to share this info and putting your self out there. There is not enough of this reporting taking place evenly across MSM today and it is very, very sad.

        I truly hope that others understand the facts shared don’t justify the actions taken but solely help us understand how this tragic scene played out.

        I also hope that others understand that you are not making a declaration of guilt or justifying the actions but just helping us understand a little more clearly.

          1. If you search through the hundreds of thousands of police-civilian contacts in a year, you can cherry-pick enough anecdotes to represent any position you like.

            As much as I a love a good anecdote, I love the facts a lot more.

            The reality is:

            Blacks and Hispanics, contrary to most conventional thinking, are no more likely to experience police-initiated contact than whites.

            BUT

            Black and Hispanic people are approximately twice as likely as whites to experience police-initiated contacts involving force or threats.

            Non-white people are twice as likely as white people to encounter police threats or force in their lives. So, yes, you can establish that there is a base of facts that suggests a tremendous amount of racism in the treatment of minorities by police. “Twice as much” over the entire universe of contacts is too big a disparity to be explained by the different behavior of the civilians during the contacts, so it’s fair to conclude that there must be different behavior by the police, and that the difference seems to be racially motivated.

            It is not fair to conclude, however, that every time a person of color is hurt in a police encounter, they would not have been hurt if they were white. That is true all too often, but a ratio of 2-to-1 is not tantamount to a universal rule. In fact, what it implies statistically is that of every two episodes where people of color are hurt, they would not have been hurt if they were white. That is a horrible indictment of our justice system, but we must bear in mind that it’s still one out of two, not one out of one. Sometimes the police do need to use force, irrespective of the race of the perp, and we have to look at the cases individually, based on all the facts, rather than to make a knee-jerk assumption that everything is about race. Many things ARE about race, too many things, but not everything.

  8. “We should not attempt to justify his horrifying death”

    Why would you even throw this in after literally authoring a post and listing many, many reasons to justify (or at least handwave away) his death with a classic “He Was No Angel” character assassination?

    1. It is important to know the facts, and that’s all there is in the post. There is a difference between a character assassination and a character description.

      The mainstream media has completely misrepresented this case. The accurate summary is that the police severely bungled their attempt to bring in a dangerous character.

      That said, it’s difficult for me to believe that a life-long officer couldn’t tell she was holding a gun instead of a taser. That may be the truth, and the body-cam seems to support it, but there’s still something there that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

      The other issue there is nuance. While the media paints in a broad brush to tell a narrative, the simple fact of the matter is that his death is equally horrifying whether he’s that sweet young dad holding his baby, or a monster waving his gun to steal money from a woman who just treated him kindly by giving him a place to sleep. I suppose the truth is that he is both of those things, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still a human life taken unnecessarily. The media narrative is irrelevant.

      One thing his history teaches us is that we know exactly why he tried to flee from the cops. The facts help get us on the path to understanding. He had broken the terms of his bail arrangement, and therefore would be taken directly to jail and kept there until the completion of his May trial – maybe as long as 20 years if he had been found guilty. He must have panicked at the thought.

      But all of that is not germane to whether he should have lived through the encounter. He should have. Even if you assume the worst about him, there’s no debate about that from any quarter.

      1. Please don’t try to justify your bullshit. You’re offending everybody’s intelligence.
        This crap happens every time a black person gets murdered by cops in America -“but look! He was a totes a crim, you guys!” Shit, it even happens when a black guy makes the news for the right reasons.
        Go back to wallowing around in the 5th-tier shithole that is Fark, and make a separate site for your half-smart wannabe-intellectual bs.

        1. I don’t know if anything happens every time, but I do know that I try to look at each incident in the proper context.

          The cops who pulled over that army lieutenant in Virginia – absolutely no justification either for pulling him over in the first place or the way they treated him. The guy was 100% innocent, the cops 100% in the wrong.

          But don’t assume that there can only be one side to every story. This one is more complicated. If the cops had cuffed Wright properly, of if they had merely tased him and brought him in, they would have simply been doing their jobs, and the fault would have been Wright’s. But the cops bungled everything, and the guy ended up dead. He did nothing to merit death, so that’s completely on them.

          1. Don’t be sanctimonious.
            Re: not hearing of cops mixing up tasers and guns, look up Oscar Grant (still remember the video of that one, it was seriously messed up) or Eric Harris. Only seems to happen when they deal with black guys, though.

        2. Reading your response I can see you don’t agree with or care about the facts shared which is your right but why attack a website that you chose to come to?

          I am Caucasian, I don’t understand the issues or challenges that someone of different nationality of race may face but ignoring or misrepresenting the situation or facts that led to this or any other tragic loss is just irresponsible.

          I hear you about the presumed character assassination but sharing the facts to understand how the situation happened is part of due justice and used to be part of good reporting.

        1. Extremely relevant. Without knowing his situation and his history, it’s not possible to understand why he was so determined not to be taken in. (He was facing possible long-term incarceration, and at the least, certain incarceration until his trial on the felony charge.)

          1. When Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, the authorities let the media report for weeks that Brown had his hands up while saying don’t shoot just before he was killed by Darren Wilson before releasing Wilson’s version of events. At one point the chief of police reported that Brown had committed a strong arm robbery just before the incident with Wilson but was vehemently criticized for attacking the victim’s character. But that robbery was extremely relevant as it was the whole reason Wilson tried to arrest Brown. Brown then struggled for Wilson’s gun, then started to flee before turning and charging at Wilson. Both forensics and witnesses that hadn’t spoken to the media confirmed Wilson’s version. I think it is quite ironic that the whole Black Lives Matter movement began in reaction to an incident where the use of force was completely justified.

            Shooting Wright was not justified. But knowing why the police were trying to arrest Wright and whether they had reason to believe he was dangerous is relevant. Actually at common law, police were allowed to use deadly force (ie shoot) a fleeing suspect believed guilty of a felony. I’m not sure if violating the terms of bail on a felony charge counted as a felony in and of itself. But that particular bit of common law doesn’t apply anymore. But the information the police had about Wright is relevant to Porter’s mental state. Since she is certainly going to be charged criminally, that is relevant to a discussion of this incident.

  9. Too true, chapter and verse of his record isn’t being reported, I guess they figure, too soon. But this is about a 12-piece bucket of depressingly stupid all the way around. Daunte – you can’t outrun a radio, where did you think you were going? Trainee cop – why was the car door open? Why not tell him to put his hands on the hood? Now-retired lady cop – your goddam voice could probably have been your most effective tool. But now a kid is dead, *his* kid is fatherless, two cops are out of work. Sick sad world, it’s enough to drive a guy to drink and drive.

    1. I take “sad enough to drive drunk” as rhetorical but drunk driving or even just drinking isn’t in principle victimless. I agree, SNAFU. I agree, we could do better. We should. And in the cases of both cops, Potter & Chauvin, their individual problems point out system problems. Not just stated policy but the implied policy in their training to some extent explains their actions. SCOTUS deadly force rulings have been faulty, leading to bad police force rules & bad training. There’s a lot here that’s wildly broken. It’s a long way beyond 1 bad cop. I mean it’s like we put in a stop sign when someone gets killed but there’s still 50 other intersections we do nothing about that are just as dangerous.

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