Aftermath of fatal shooting: How can a handgun be mistaken for a Taser?
Corrections and clarifications: A previous version of this article misstated the weight of the X26P Taser.
The fatal shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop by a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer, was called an accidental discharge by the police chief, who said the officer mistook her firearm for her Taser.
Chief Tim Gannon's characterization of the shooting has raised questions about police officers mistaking firearms for Tasers.
Gannon said Monday he believed Officer Kim Potter, 48, unintentionally grabbed her firearm instead of her Taser when she shot Wright on Sunday. Body-camera footage of the incident, released by police, has Potter shouting "Taser!" three times before firing.
More: Experts say Taser confusion errors like Daunte Wright shooting are rare but avoidable.
Potter and Gannon resigned from the department Tuesday. Potter will be charged with second-degree manslaughter, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
An investigation into the shooting continues.
FatalEncounters.org found this trend from 2001 to 2021.
While it's not known what Taser and firearm models the Brooklyn Center officer used, or how she carried them, the two weapons are different in size, weight and appearance. A comparison of models commonly used by police:
In addition to their physical differences, the weapons are usually holstered on opposite sides of police gun belts. The handgun is on the "strong side" – on the officer's right side if the officer is right-handed – while the Taser is on the "weak side," which would be the officer's left.
Police have recognized the necessity of strong side/weak side holsters.
The nonprofit Police Executive Search Forum, a police research group, recommended in 2011 that officers keep Tasers "in a weak-side holster and should train to perform a weak-hand draw or cross-draw to reduce the possibility of accidentally drawing and/or firing a sidearm."
A cross-draw would be a right-handed officer reaching to his/her left side for a Taser.
But to a police officer under stress, operating automatically under instinct learned by training, it's possible to make a mistake.
We can't forget, "there's a family on the other end of these errors that are grieving the loss of a son, no matter how well we might explain the error," says Lewis Von Kliem, a former police officer and executive editor of Force Science Institute.
"And it's no less tragic for the families in the community."
How a Taser works
"When you engage in a repeated activity like a police officer drawing a firearm, one of the goals is to develop what's called automaticity," Kliem says. "We want it to be automatic.
"It's important because you're not thinking about it. You can focus on the threat, or on looking for threats and risk."
The danger of a mistake increases with increased stress and time constraint, Kliem says, resulting in a "slip error," a mistake in which "you intend to do one thing but your motor performance picks up and you do another."
Even after subconsciously discerning differences between objects, "once your brain decides you're doing it correctly, it doesn't register the difference," Kliem says.
More police training would help, says Brian Higgins, former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey, and lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
"How the taser is built, where it's carried and color configuration are all meant to help officers not be confused with their firearms," Higgins says. "What brings it all together is going to be training. That's I believe that's going to be a central focus of this."
A design change in Tasers may help, Kliem says.
A Taser that operated differently, perhaps by activating it with a thumb instead of a trigger finger, "might sufficiently break your attention and make you consciously and deliberately go through the movements to pull out the weapon and use it."
SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Associated Press
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fatal shooting forces question: How can handgun be mistaken for Taser?
