Pictured are Vice President Kamala Harris and twenty-year-old police killing victim Daunte Wright Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, associate publisher:
WASHINGTON, D.C.-Vice President Kamala Harris, the nation's first Black and first female vice president whom president Joe Biden tapped to run on his presidential ticket and a former U.S. senator and California attorney general, spoke out on Tuesday against the tragic police shooting death in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center on Sunday afternoon of twenty-one-year-old Daunte Wright as protesters continued to clash with police during the third night of contentious protesting.
The outspoken Harris, who is an Obama ally and an unsuccessful candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president that impressed Joe Biden enough that he wanted her on his team, said that Wright should be alive today and that he died unjustly at the hands of police, and that race played a part in his shooting death.
Harris' remarks came during a White House event on Black maternal mortality where she spoke to Wright's family members indirectly and said that she and President Biden “grieve with you” and “stand with you.”
She also demanded accountability from law enforcement in the matter.
“Our nation needs justice and healing. And law enforcement must be held to the highest standards of accountability,” the vice president said. “We know that folks will keep dying if we don’t fully address racial injustice and inequities in our country from implicit bias to broken systems.”
President Biden called for calm and said Wright's shooting death is tragic.
Tuesday's arrests of protesters during the third night of unrest in the Minneapolis suburb came after they refused to disassemble, the unrest precipitated in response to the police killing on Sunday afternoon of Wright during a traffic stop that went wrong, Wright's killing coming as the prosecution rest in the George Floyd murder trial and the defense begins presenting its case in a courtroom in Minneapolis just 10 miles down the road.
Protesters, young and old alike, have marched through the city of Brooklyn Center demanding justice for Wright since the killing occurred earlier this week.
The protesting began Sunday night where protesters quarreled with police and broke into some 20 local businesses, and continued through Monday and Tuesday night.
By midnight Wednesday morning they had disseminated but vowed to come back night after night.
Police were on edge and held a line after threatening more of them with an arrest late Tuesday amid live coverage from CNN and other top national and international news networks.
Police shot off tear gas during an agitated protest on Monday night.
Tuesday night's protest was even more contentious.
A nightly curfew is in order and the state patrol and Minnesota National Guard remain on guard, fearing potential riots, sources say, like those that erupted locally and nationwide in the aftermath of Floyd's death by police in May of last year.
A strong National Guard contingent stood by early afternoon on Tuesday as protesters chanted, prayed, and sang songs, and some threw debris at police, mainly water bottles.
Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran White female cop who gunned down Wright, and her police chief, Tim Gannon, have resigned after the chief said publicly on Monday that the dash cam killing of the young Black man was, in his view, an accidental shooting death.
The former chief said the officer mistakenly pulled her gun, and not her taser, a statement that angered Black Civil Rights leaders, protesters and Wright family attorneys, who joined with Floyd's family members for a press conference against the police chief.
Manslaughter charges are expected to be filed against Potter, sources said.
About 500 protesters, most of them young and many of them White, confronted police during the height of the three-night racial unrest in Brooklyn Center that is making national news as the Congressional Black Caucus and federal lawmakers like former House minority whip Rep James Clyburn of South Carolina call for policing reforms.
Wright family attorney Benjamin Crump wants an indictment on murder and other criminal charges of the cop who killed Wright as the celebrated case is a reminder of how little the life of Black men mean to anxious cops with little training who often do as they please to Black people under the clothe of qualified immunity.
Rep Clyburn wants laws amended to do away with qualified immunity, a legal defense that essentially protects law enforcement in the line of duty if they act within the scope of their authority.
Wright's shooting death, occurring simultaneously with the George Floyd murder trial a stone's throw away, has made Minneapolis and its metropolitan area, inclusive of the suburban city of Brooklyn Center, the epicenter of excessive force shooting deaths of unarmed Black men like Floyd and Wright.
Activists and Black leaders, including members of Congress, say it is a clear indictment relative to the nation's racist and inept legal system and its negative and oppressive impact on Black people, and their families
That George Floyd murder trial involves a former White cop who has pleaded not guilty in the vicious murder of Floyd, a 46-year-old father of two.
A veteran cop before he was fired after killing Floyd on May 25 following an arrest for alleged forgery, Chauvin, 45, faces charges of second degree intentional murder, third degree murder, and second degree manslaughter.
A conviction on at least one or potentially all of the charges is likely, legal experts have said.
Three other police officers at the scene who did nothing while Chauvin held his knee on the neck of the handcuffed Floyd for more than nine minutes until he killed him were also fired await trial on lesser charges.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com.
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