When a cop shoots a black person, it takes about 20 nanoseconds (if that) before the defensive reaction sets in and that person’s background is trawled through, looking for possible reasons that they might have been a bad person who maybe deserved to be shot. Because a bad, meth-smoking, counterfeit-carrying person somehow deserves a humiliating death face-down on concrete while they cry for their mother?

It’s sick, it’s pathetic, and it’s shitty to try to distract from what a cop did, by trawling out flaws from their victim’s past. And, did you notice how quickly Kim Potter and her boss resigned, as if to say, “We’ve been punished enough! There, are you satisfied?” As if shooting someone in the chest in a simple traffic stop is something that can be paid off so easily.

Then, the next move in the game is “OK, we’re gonna charge them with a crime, and have a court case (which we’re going to lose) but you ought to be satisfied by that. Justice was done!”

The US is so cruel and corrupt that it has been passing off these sops as “justice” for far too long. Our representatives are implicitly siding with the police, when they pretend to accept those arguments, and then offer to spend more money on the police by “training them.”

Here’s what I want to call to your attention: Kim Potter is described mostly in positive terms. Why? Oh, she’s a “26-year veteran”, that’s good, right? Because someone who’s been a cop for 26 years is dedicated and has had plenty of time to learn her taser from her service pistol, and her asshole from a hole in the ground. We are supposed to somehow accept that her 26 years of being a cop is a good thing when, in fact, it’s more like Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz’ poetry: it serves to highlight how bad a cop she is.

What is missing from most of the reporting is Potter’s lamentable history.

No, she was not disciplined for carrying counterfeit $20 or snorting meth, but this is relevant. [db]

In 2019, Potter—who was the police union president at the time—was one of the first officers to respond to a police shooting that left a 21-year-old autistic man dead.

Ok, imagine if the victim in a police shooting had a history of being involved in shootings that had killed people. They would be “murder suspect so-and-so” not 26-year veteran. One question that is being conspicuously not asked is “how in the fuck was Potter still on the force after the 2019 incident?”

“Officer Potter instructed Officers Turner and Akers to exit the residence, get into separate squad cars, turn off their body worn cameras, and to not talk to each other,” states a report issued by the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. No charges were filed in that case.

Oh, so she was not just “one of the first responders to a police shooting” she was involved in destruction of evidence. 3 years later, she killed someone, herself.

Listen up: if you’re thinking in terms of suppressing evidence in a shooting, you’re also going to think how to suppress evidence when you shoot someone, yourself. It kind of puts her “Oops I thought it was my taser” story in a different light, doesn’t it? This is a cop who has a history of manipulating evidence in murder cases, and now she’s a murderer, what do you think?

Remember, when the cops start trawling through their victim’s past and saying, “he was a meth user” they’re implying, not very subtly, that a meth user is someone so volatile and comfortable with breaking the law that they might shoot at a cop if they had a gun, or something. Using that same kind of reasoning, Potter is a person who is demonstrably comfortable with manipulating evidence in a murder – she could have set the whole situation of where she killed Duante Wright for fun. Absurd, right? But why isn’t Potter’s past being brought into the harsh light of this story?

She’s a cop that tried to cover up one killing and got away with it. 4 years later, she kills and is trying to get away with it.

Wright had a minor police record, with two petty misdemeanor charges filed against him in August 2019 for selling marijuana and disorderly conduct.

So, while Potter was manipulating evidence in a police-perpetrated murder, Wright was selling some dope and partying too loudly? Please tell me whose career needed to be shut down, in 2019. Please tell me who was the danger to society.

Because a cop that tells other cops how to conceal evidence in a police-perpetrated murder, has only been caught that once. Wright was caught selling weed and it’s probably not a shocking extrapolation to think that maybe he had sold weed before. It’s not a shocking extrapolation to think that maybe Potter had been involved with manipulating evidence, before, too. Where did she learn that trick? There are three possibilities:

1. She sat around imagining how she’d manipulate evidence if she found herself in that situation
2. Some other corrupt cop in her department taught her that trick
3. 1 & 2

There are probably other possibilities, like that the police union has training sessions on how to defeat body-cams, but that’s too horrible to contemplate.

So we know for a fact that Potter was a corrupt cop, unworthy of the uniform, who should not have been allowed to carry a weapon since at least 2019. And she served for 26 years.

What other shit was she up to? The others in her department know, but they’re also in on it so they’re not telling anything.

I wish I was better at math and simulation, because there’s got to be some algorithm we could apply to calculate the probability that any individual cop is a “bad apple” given the amount of sketchy evidence manipulation and basic corruption that is passed off as normal by any given department. What is the likelihood that other cops in Kim’s unit did not know about the incident where she told the other 2 cops to turn off their cameras? We know, from that statement alone, that Kim Potter was not “one bad apple” – there were at least 3 “bad apples” right there. And, the command chain that did not investigate that incident and end some careers: more bad apples. Who else was in on the 2019 incident? Were there any “bad apple” district attorneys or did they just keep their heads down? Where was Internal Affairs in all this and how did they manage to not follow up on it? This all leads me to offer my Theory on Police Applesauce: once you’ve made applesauce (a precinct) and mixed a few wormy bad apples into it, you can’t remove the bad apples anymore – the whole mess is rotten and needs to be thrown away and you need to start over with fresh, good apples.

What we’re really looking at, folks, is a giant kettle of rotten, foaming, worm-filled apples, with maybe one or two fresh apples thrown in – and they’re going to rot immediately in that environment.

I have designed a training program for police. All police should try it:

1. You get tased
2. A real gun is pointed at you. You are then presented with a taser and a real gun. If you mis-identify the taser, you get shot, once
3. Hold your breath 9 minutes