TEXAS, USA — The Brooklyn Center Police Department says Daunte Wright died after former police officer Kim Potter mistook her gun for her taser as he resisted arrest.
Tom Selman, Precinct 1 Constable for Angelina County, tried to fathom how an officer could make this mistake.
“To mistakenly pull your taser or mistakenly pull your duty sidearm and discharge it in the place of a taser," he said. "Probably what you have there is someone that is under an extremely high-stress load.”
Herbert Hayter, a former police officer and director of the Tyler Junior College Police Academy, remembers his training.
"We're at the gun range, you know, two or three times a year and we, we pull it and we deploy it, we pull it, we deploy it so many times, and probably don't do it enough with the taser. And so and then when you get into a situation that muscle memory kicks in, you reach for what you're accustomed to reaching for," he said.
He says officers in East Texas are trained to keep their lethal weapons on their dominant side. Tasers also look and feel differently than a gun.
“If you've ever seen one, their color is pretty garish, loud, you know, red or yellow. So it doesn't look like your lethal weapon," he said.
In the past 20 years, there have been at least 16 incidents of weapon confusion in the nation, according to the fatal encounters’ national database.
Tom Selman explains that there’s a very direct process that officers in our area follow when it comes to confrontation. It’s called the "Use of Force Continuum" and it essentially aims to ensure that officers never use any more force than necessary to gain control of a situation.