If you were writing a cop show and the script included a police killing in a small city adjacent to a larger city hosting perhaps the most publicized trial of an officer accused of homicide you would understandably be pressed to show how stupid the idea was. Every police chief within hundreds of miles of Minneapolis should have cautioned his officers to use extreme caution when encountering young black men during routine traffic stops.
So instead, we have three cops approaching a smallish 20 year old black man in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center as if he just pulled off the heist of the century instead of having an expired license tag. When a 26 year veteran makes the inexplicable error of mistaking her service gun for a tazer, the stupidity elevates to tragedy as the young man is killed. This has led to four nights of riots and protests in the town and flareups across the nation. Until we confront the racism endemic in the US, being killed for being black will continue to roil our society.
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