On Sunday, a young Black man named Daunte Wright was killed by a white police officer in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

• This happened just 10 or 15 miles from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin last May and from the courthouse where Chauvin is currently on trial.

• If the police are to be believed, they stopped Daunte Wright because the car he was driving had expired tags. Then they noticed an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, a violation of state law.

• That’s when they found out there was an arrest warrant for Daunte Wright — for missing a court appearance related to two misdemeanors.

• As they were placing him under arrest, Daunte Wright got back into his car.

• Then an officer fatally shot Daunte Wright in the chest from point-blank range.

• The officer supposedly mistook her gun for a Taser — even though police are trained to holster those very different weapons on opposite hips, even though Tasers look and feel very different from guns, even though she was holding the gun for at least several seconds before she fired it, and even though she had 26 years of experience.

Outdated stickers and missed court dates should not be a death sentence.

But law enforcement in this country — like far too much of our society — is infested with racism and pathological violence.

In all of 2020, there were only 18 days where someone was *not* killed by law enforcement somewhere in the U.S. Even with Americans staying home in unprecedented numbers because of the pandemic.

Please join me in calling for comprehensive structural reform of policing in America — to root out bias on the part of individual law enforcement personnel, to disrupt the institutional racism rampant throughout law enforcement agencies, to confront corruption within police unions, to enforce true accountability for police racism and brutality, to reshape our very conceptions of law enforcement and public safety, and to radically overhaul the widespread discrimination that plagues the entire criminal justice system.

Add your name.

Thanks for taking action.

For Daunte Wright and so many others,

- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen

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