On Sunday, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota after being pulled over for traffic violations. The violations? He had expired tags on his license and air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror of his car. This story is heartbreakingly familiar. Just a year ago the country erupted in protest over the death of George Floyd after police arrested him for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. Police interactions with citizens shouldn’t end in death, and yet hundreds are dying at the hands of police every year. In order to protect and serve Black Americans, we need immediate solutions.

Joining this episode are protesters Aja, Melina, and Emilaysia in Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park, as well as the ACLU’s Policing Policy Advisor, Paige Fernandez, and Senior Staff Attorney of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, Somil Trivedi. 

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MOLLY KAPLAN
[00:13] From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I’m Molly Kaplan, your host.

On Sunday, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota after being pulled over for traffic violations. The violations? He had expired tags on his license and air fresheners hanging in the rearview mirror of his car. While this story is shocking, it’s also heartbreakingly familiar.

Just a year ago the country erupted in protest over the death of George Floyd after police detained him for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store.

Police interactions with citizens shouldn’t end in death, and yet hundreds are dying at the hands of police every year.

PROTESTERS: Say his name. Daunte Wright. Say his name. Daunte Wright…

MOLLY
Protests for Daunte Wright are happening just ten miles from the courtroom where Derek Chauvin is on trial for the death of George Floyd.

PROTESTERS: No justice, no peace. Prosecute the police.

We spoke with demonstrators in Brooklyn Center on Monday night to hear how they’re processing the events on the ground.

[TRUMPETS PLAYING]

This is Aja, a human rights commissioner for Brooklyn Park, an activist and a therapist.

[FLASHBANGS AND FIREWORKS]

AJA KING
[01:33] You know, this is about like the fifth shooting that I've experienced since living up in Minnesota. And it's overwhelming to know that Minnesota has a huge history of shooting unarmed black men in this state alone. I think if we look at the numbers, over 600 with very few prosecutions of the police in any indictments or anything. So Chauvin’s case is a very rare one right now. But when I heard that it happened, just numb, just numb. But being here in the space makes it real because I have two black boys myself.

MOLLY
Just miles down the road from Aja, friends Melina and Emilaysia joined a crowd of protesters at the Brooklyn Center police department.

EMILAYSIA BOYD
[02:20] My first reaction was just disappointment and sadness to know that this is continuing to happen and nothing's happening about it. I broke down.

MELINA MURIC
I was honestly, I never even had a first reaction because racism has never ended, never ended, never ended. It's been happening for years and years and years. It's saddening. It's very saddening. Innocent lives are being lost. People with children, it's fucked up.

MOLLY
Children losing their parents over a traffic violation. It’s beyond comprehension for most of us, including Aja; it’s a reality she says needs to change.

AJA
[02:59] I mean, traffic stops are deadly. Traffic stops have been proven deadly. Look at Philando Castile. You know, I mean, we look at all these black men that get stopped during traffic stops and they are either hurt, brutalized, beaten or whatever the case may be. So Dante's response to want to get back in the car and actually he did it right because he called his mama. Oh, you know, he stopped. He called his mama. So it's like I'm at a loss to what do I even tell my son? My son's fifteen. He's supposed to be driving pretty soon. I don't even know if I want him to drive, but that takes away his ability to be independent. But what do I do? What do you do? So, you know, it's it's hard. This is tough. This is hurtful and it seems hopeless. But somebody has got to keep hope alive.

[TRUMPETS PLAYING]

MOLLY
With each passing year, the list of victims of police violence gets longer. In order to protect and serve Black Americans, we need immediate solutions. I spoke with ACLU’s Policing Policy Advisor, Paige Fernandez, and Senior Staff Attorney of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, Somil Trivedi to break down where we need to go from here.

Somil, Paige, thanks for joining us.

PAIGE FERNANDEZ
[04:21] Thanks so much for having us.

MOLLY
So the community in Minneapolis has been witness to both the trauma of George Floyds murder and now to Daunte Wright’s. And that's just in the last year or so. Paige, you joined us last June when protesters were in the streets for George Floyd. And back then we spoke about why it's so hard to hold police accountable. But it feels like there was something else that we also needed to address then and now. So bringing the conversation forward, it seems like accountability is not the singular cure to this problem, and it also doesn't erase the harm that's already been done. So how do we get in front of the harm?

PAIGE
You know, I think it's really important that we emphasize that real justice would be George Floyd and Daunte Wright being alive today. What happens after people are killed by the police? This idea of accountability and prosecution hopefully provides some semblance of peace and healing for their families and their communities and their loved ones. But it doesn't justice would truly have been them being alive today. And so it's really important that we focus on the front end. How do we avoid this from happening in the start? We want accountability when it does happen, but we don't want it to happen at all. So how do we ensure it doesn't happen at all? And I think that means completely reimagining our carceral system and our punitive system. And obviously within that, what policing institutions are, you know, I hear a lot of people being like our institutions are broken. And what's important to recognize is that they're not broken. They were designed this way. They were designed to exert social control over black people. They were designed to hurt black people in this country. So we really need to think about how do we limit the role, responsibilities, power and funding of police so these interactions that lead to the death of black men and over a thousand people every year in this country at the hands of police doesn't happen.

MOLLY
[06:30] Can we also talk about why police training isn't a part of the solutions that we're offering? Because, you know, I'm thinking back in 2016, Philando Castile was also killed in Minnesota, I think it was in St. Paul. And it was also for a traffic stop. And one of the solutions that was peddled back then, both at the federal level and at the local level, was like, we just need police training.

PAIGE
Yeah, I mean, I think it's elected officials and politicians' instinct to rely on police training. And it also gives them an avenue to provide police with more funding, which is deeply disturbing when you look at the disparities in funding for police versus other social services. Philando Castile was murdered by police at a traffic stop again in 2016 in Minnesota. Minnesota invested 12 million dollars in police training. In police training that did not save George Floyd, that did not save Daunte, right. We know that within a racist institution, you cannot train the racism to disappear. That's not going to happen. These trainings do not work. We know that the officer who killed Daunte right now was on the force for 26 years. She went through multiple trainings. Training is not the solution. Implicit bias training is not the solution. De-escalation training is not the solution because quite frankly, people in the police force do not bring that training out. And we've seen repeatedly through many quantitative studies that it does not actually impact how police work with people. But consistently, despite all this evidence, we have to show that police training doesn't work. Politicians and elected officials continue to rely on it. And I think it's important that we discuss the ties that they have to law enforcement and police unions in general as well. Police unions exert a lot of power over elected officials, which makes it really hard for them to actually implement transformational change as police unions are opposed to every change. They're even opposed to additional training. Right. So it's impossible to talk about things like decriminalization or the repeal of certain criminal laws and offenses or divestment with them when they're stuck on training. And even with that, they have to push really hard and to loop back around to just like police unions. We just found out that the officer who killed Daunte was the president of the Brooklyn Center Police Union. And that is incredibly disturbing, but also should not be a surprise to anybody.

MOLLY
[09:11] Somil, I want to ask you, according to Police Score Card, an organization that collects data on policing across the country, police killed 121 people during traffic stops alone last year. None of these seem like interactions that law enforcement necessarily had to be involved in. How do we lessen the interaction between law enforcement and citizens?

SOMIL TRIVEDI
[09:33] It's a great question. We lessen them by eliminating there's no good reason for armed, violent cops to be interacting with citizens over such low level potential offenses. And I want to keep in mind, by the way, that these are all legally innocent human beings. OK, we like calling them offenders and suspects and criminals. They are not yet. And that matters. But yes, to second Paige's point, training doesn't work. Law reform has not worked. I spend my days doing law reform. And I have to admit after a while that the Supreme Court has been complicit in propounding the myth that every interaction between police and people are inherently dangerous for police and therefore they can pull over black people under any pretext and start searching them. They can yank them out of their car under any pretext because it's assumed dangerous. Right. They can assert use of force with virtual impunity due to both cases like Graham v. Connor and doctrines like qualified immunity. Right. We're chipping away at these doctrines that we're going to continue to chip away. But let's be honest, it hasn't worked yet. And the most easily administered prophylactic way to make sure that people like George Floyd and Daunte Wright and and still live is to not send armed cops after them in the first place.

And I want to say one more thing. I think cops want this to forget the police union nonsense and forget the party line, cops didn't sign up to pull people over and sniff around for weed and issued traffic citations. And they're not trained for it. They're not good at it. We have to say out loud now, and they more than often end up harming more than they help. So let's give them what they want and protect communities by getting them out of the business of enforcing most of the interactions that they engage with. And I say most because I think what people don't realize in America is 80 percent of criminal dockets around the country are for misdemeanors. Cops and prosecutors love talking about protecting us from serious crime. That's not what they're doing the vast majority of time. And I don't think that's what they want to be doing. So let's oblige them and get them out of the business of 80 percent of what they're already doing and don't want to do.

MOLLY
[11:53] I think listening to the audio from the Chauvin trial, one point that really struck me was that the person who called 911, one when the store owner thought that the 20 dollar bill was counterfeit, seemed to say that he wished he had never done it, that he had so much regret about having made that call because of what happened. And I'm wondering, what is the alternative like? We have all been told call 911 what he was told to call 911. How do we get out of that knee jerk response? What is the alternative? What would that look like?

PAIGE
[12:30] Yeah, I really appreciate that question, I continuously go back to this Angela Davis quote, and at this point people are probably sick of me saying it. But she says that in the US, prisons and police are given like life and death, nothing else in the US is given like prisons and police. We are not guaranteed health care. We are not guaranteed education. We are not guaranteed mental health care. We are not guaranteed a range of services that we know would prevent people from having to engage in different types of criminalized activities. Right. Crime is, first of all, a social construct. And second of all, it's not random. People have to engage in it when we can't meet their needs. So I think there really needs to be a focus on how do we allow people to thrive in this country? How do we provide them with the resources to thrive here? And I think it starts with shrinking the responsibilities of police and then divesting from police departments and reinvesting in community services and programs. And I mean, truly, people are like, well, what will we invest in? There's a range of services we can invest in. There are examples of services like Cahoots in Eugene, Oregon, where there's a completely separate entity that is dispatched to behavioral health crises and mental health crises. We have examples from across the country of different pilots being tried out. And then we can engage in and invest in violence prevention programs, in youth programming, in job programming, in education and housing. I mean, truly policing targets overwhelmingly low income people. So what if we provided them with the resources to have a job that pays them, well, a living wage and provides them with housing? So many of the criminal laws on the book criminalize poverty.

MOLLY
at the same time as we are also changing what we call a crime.

PAIGE
Absolutely. Absolutely. Completely reimagining how we think of harm in this country. Right. Harm, we're not saying that harm is going to stop, but how do we try to prevent that and how do we get to real healing?

SOMIL
[14:48] I was going to note that specifically to your point, about 911 once we reinvest in all of these services. There's a bunch of other numbers below nine that you can call. Right. It can be a part of a menu of options. And it's that people don't feel like they have any options when they call the police. Let's give them to them. I also want to talk for a second about Daunte Wright because we will inevitably see tough on crime. People say, well, he had an open warrant, but let's talk about that. First of all, there is no justification for killing him. So I hesitate to even talk about the circumstances that got him there because that's playing on their turf. But I want to note just how many failures led to the situation that we saw just a few days ago. Daunte Wright had an open warrant because he pled guilty to two petty misdemeanors when he was 18. Okay, if we had a society that really cared about uplifting black boys instead of tearing them down and we had invested in the kind of social services that Paige is talking about, he would have never got within thousand feet of a courtroom for something that white kids and privileged kids do all day, every day when they're 18 with no fear of criminal consequence. And yet we target the criminal system at people like Daunte Wright so that when he is pulled over for a nonsense charge like hanging air fresheners from his rearview mirror, he all of a sudden has an open warrant. He's considered potentially dangerous and then they can handle him like an animal and shoot him down in his car. So all of these failings prove that we have an addiction to incarceration to deal with societal problems and a real lack of policy imagination. And so it's that policy imagination that would, in a very real way, have saved Daunte Wright's life because he never would have been in the position of having an open warrant for doing what 18 year olds do across this country every single day.

MOLLY
I'm also curious about talking about how racial profiling factors into low level offenses like traffic violations. In 2014, the ACLU got arrest data from the Minneapolis Police Department for low level offenses that happened somewhere between January 2012 and September 2014. And the data includes information from like almost a hundred thousand arrests. And the numbers show a huge disparity in the way that police enforce low level offenses. And the disparity was as high as eight point seven times that a black person would be arrested than a white person. And I'm curious if you can sort of draw the line between racial profiling and these low level offenses.

PAIGE
[17:24] Yeah, I think that a big point to make here is that we push police into low income communities of color, that is where they are most present, which obviously leads to racial disparities because they are not in white gated communities. They are not seeing rich white teenagers are smoking weed. They don't care because they are in the predominantly black communities of color and predominantly low income communities. That's where they are stationed. So obviously, there will be disparities that come up. And this is the problem that we see with ideas around, like predictive policing and sending police to places where there's a lot of criminal activity, which is complete nonsense. Of course, if you have the majority of your police station in one specific community, one demographic, you will have higher arrest rates for those people. And at the core of this is, again, why policing was created in this country. It started as a slave patrol in Charleston, South Carolina, to exert social control and ensure that enslaved people would not try to get to freedom. And so from its inception, it's been targeted at black people and you can't tear that out. It's over a hundred year history of them targeting black people. And that is their job, right? This is not a broken system. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do to target black and brown people and to oppress those people.

MOLLY
And that racism doesn't just stop at the point of policing. Right, Somil? I mean, this is something that continues straight into the entire criminal legal system from jury selection and judges and prosecutors. Can you give us an overview of how that racism becomes a thread throughout the entire contact with the criminal legal system?

SOMIL
[19:25] Yeah, I'm so glad you raised that, because that is a fact. When you send police after black and brown communities, they end up in the system. And our system is designed to keep you in it, not to get you out of it. So, for example, Paige just mentioned something like predictive policing that's supposed to be a panacea to get the bias out. But if it's based on, quote unquote, criminal history, then of course, if your community is targeted, you're going to have a longer criminal history that doesn't just make you more likely to get police. It makes you more likely to be held pretrial. Right. If you're more likely to be held in jail pretrial, you're more likely to take a plea deal and just get back to your family. Right. That gives you a conviction. Then you're more likely to get more time once you're sentenced. Then you're more likely to get harsh conditions for probation and parole. Then you're more likely not to be able to get a job afterwards. Then you're more likely not to be able to pay your court fines. Right. And around and around we go. And that's why, again, the simplest solution is the best one. Let's remove the criminal justice system from the vast majority of our policy making and instead build people up instead of catching them in this trap.

MOLLY
And that's part of the point. Like we keep trying to look at the point where if the explosion happens, the trauma happens. But I think what you're also saying, both of you, is that if we divest from police and invest in communities, we're actually just starting to address the problem where it begins.

SOMIL
[20:55] I like to use the example of opioids all of a sudden when opioids were decimating new communities that hadn't previously been acknowledged as being decimated by drug use. We didn't turn primarily to the criminal justice system. Right. We infused money into help for them, real medically based help. And I don't begrudge those communities who received that kind of help. I want to expand to that kind of help to everybody else so that we never get close to someone being police force, having something like an addiction. And addiction is just one element of it. Paige mentioned earlier what percentage of our low level enforcement is for homelessness. Homelessness is not a crime. And if we had just taken the money that we gave to the police officers who went around arresting homeless people and instead gave them homes, we'd be saving ourselves a lot of trouble. And on and on it goes like that for every social ill that we need to cure, policing and prosecution are not the answers to them.

MOLLY
I also wanted to come back to where we started, which is talking about accountability, because I think we've acknowledged that the criminal legal system is not the best place for accountability, but where is the best place? What is a better system of accountability? Because as you said earlier, we cannot prevent harm. Harm will happen. So what systems can we look at or what models can we look at for accountability?

PAIGE
[22:16] You know that there's a lot of amazing work that abolitionists, feminists have done on this, especially groups like Survived and Punished and how they engage in healing. And I think some good models are kind of transformative justice and restorative justice models. And some of these models have been piloted on a small level. I think it is specific to every community and that we should be really folks focused on local solutions. But there are models out there that we can build upon.

SOMIL
We want to talk about holding police accountable, right? I agree with that. And I also agree that the criminal justice system is broken. So where does that leave us? That leaves us systemic accountability. Right. So when there is a use of force by a police officer, I don't want local prosecutors who have an inherent conflict of interest with those police officers investigating them, often not charging them. But even if they do, charging them gets us only backwards looking remedies and not forward looking ones. Right. So instead, I want the federal Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., to open an investigation into patterns and practices of unlawful conduct. And I want them to impose the kind of remedies that we're talking about today. And that's where the disconnect has been, because up until now, we have had some semblance of systemic investigations by attorneys general and D.C., but they tend to rely on the same kinds of remedies that Paige talked about pumping more money into training, pumping more money into technology. Right. Instead, why don't those investigations engage, first of all, community members to understand how they want to fix their community? And I guarantee you, it won't be about putting more money into the police. Also, why don't they engage people like us who've spent a lifetime holding law enforcement accountable rather than folks who have an inherent conflict of interest with those law enforcement officers? So that is a new model of accountability that can go alongside some of the reinvestment that Paige and I are talking about.

MOLLY
[24:29] I also wanted to ask you something you referenced having been in this in this work for a while, and I know you have to and you're in it day in and day out. And I'm curious to ask you a more personal question, which is what is the effect of witnessing and responding to this kind of trauma on repeat?

SOMIL
Look, I'll never pretend that it's anything like the people in the community who are suffering right now, but it's hard, we can admit that it is tough to have to dove analytically into a situation that is anything but analytical at this point. Right. And to have to process competing emotions while also trying to extract some good from it. But. As naive as it may sounds, I feel optimistic. We are making change, we're having a national conversation where we didn't have one before. We are getting more and more officers fired on the spot for these kinds of things where before they were completely protected. Does that mean that we're anywhere close to the finish line? Not at all. But it means that we can get up every day with a little bit of hope that we're making a difference. And that makes a difference to me at least.

PAIGE
[25:30] I feel tired most of the time, and it's really challenging to not become just completely disillusioned. And I need to remind myself to ground myself sometimes. And also, we are inundated with this information all the time and trying to just take a step back sometimes to focus on me and my loved ones in my community. But I look, I share in the optimism. So I keep on referencing the fact that Mariame Kaba put out a book on abolition and it was number seven on the New York Times bestseller list. Like that is huge. Like who would have thought a year ago that a book on police and prison abolition would be number seven on the New York Times bestseller list? That is gigantic. Right. And a poll was just released a few days ago which showed that a majority of Americans support reallocating money and putting money into community based services and programs in alternative responses to mental health and limiting how police respond to people who are using drugs and other substances. Right. And so there is momentum. I think we're really moving people to a place and it's going to be a slow movement and we just got to acknowledge that. But look how far we've come in a year. Right. And that is it's huge. And I am thrilled that this public education, the advocacy and the organizing the black organizers and abolitionists have been engaging in for decades and decades and decades is finally coming to the mainstream. And so. I am simultaneously really sad and heartbroken and frustrated, and sometimes I feel like it's not going to work and I'm fighting these elected officials who are never going to budge when the public is moving. And I think that's really important. So, like an example I can give is Oregon passed a state ballot measure last year decriminalizing drug possession. It was huge. That was with a state ballot initiative. Right. And that shows that the public is in support of the transformational changes we're putting forth right now. There's a bill being debated in Nevada that would decriminalize a range of traffic offenses. Right. So there is so much we can do and that is happening. And while elected officials might be reluctant for more transformational change, I think the public is really on board with that.

MOLLY
[28:00] And to close out, how do we keep ourselves, the public and I'm counting myself among the public moving. How do we keep going? I think the the fear is always that we could lose momentum. And if you lose momentum, what happens? So how do we keep the momentum going on, keeping this national conversation moving? Because we're not there yet as both of you already said.

SOMIL
I think get local, right? One thing that people don't really understand when we say the words criminal justice system is they think there's one system, there's tens of thousands of systems, most of them at the state and local level. Right. And the public doesn't need to push the national conversation or fix things at a national level. Just fix your town, fix your county, go out and organize 10 people to go out and march for Daunte Wright's life. That's easy enough. And I think little movements like that across the country can really move the ball forward. Instead of putting the entire weight of the movement on your shoulders, start small.

PAIGE
Yeah, I mean Somil, you just stole what I was going to say, but I was going to say I don't think people recognize the power that exists on the local level and how much change can be implemented on the local level and how impactful we can be. Right. We have a lot of power over our elected officials on the local level. More power than we have over federal elected officials and state elected officials. We have power. They will listen to us in many regards if we push and we push. I think it's great that people are organizing on the local level. And it's just it's so important that we push politicians on the local level to do better and just have these conversations right. There are so many groups engaged right now in narrative shift programming. How do we shift the narrative on our carceral punitive systems? How do we do that? How do we talk to people and really get out there? And I think it is starting like talk to your neighbors about what defunding and abortion is, what alternatives look like. And we found through different organizing tactics, use of the ACLU that long term conversations with people move that. I can say from talking to my mom about these issues, it's really improved her in the right direction. So we have a lot of power on the local level and for people to not get discouraged, this is a long battle. People have been fighting it for years. My dad was a Black Panther in the 70s. Right. This is an ongoing battle, but we all really need to be committed to it.

MOLLY
[30:29]] Well, Paige and Somil, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. We're so appreciative of you.

PAIGE
Thank you, Molly.

SOMIL
Thank you so much.

PROTESTERS: No justice, no peace. Prosecute the police.

MELINA
[30:45] Many people are here with drums and protesting with signs. A lot of cops are trying to border us in, but it's very beautiful that everyone's coming together and unity to make a change.

EMILAYSIA
And we're not leaving.

MELINA
No, we're not leaving. We're staying here all night.

EMILAYSIA
Just for Daunte that’s all we want.

MELINA
Yes, justice for Daunte. Justice for George Floyd. Justice for everybody, everybody.

EMILAYSIA
Breonna Taylor! Everyone that was killed.

MELINA
Everyone, everybody.

MOLLY
Thank you to Aja, Melina, and Emilaysia for speaking with us. And thanks to you for listening. If you’d like to support our work to decriminalize low level offenses, divest from policing and reinvest in community resources, please visit aclu.org/liberty. Until next week, stay strong.