WATCH: Brooklyn Center Officials Confronted by Anguished Residents During Stunning Presser on Daunte Wright Killing

 

A Tuesday press conference in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota featured anguished residents confronting the mayor and police officials over what concrete steps they will take to stop further police shootings of Black men.

Mayor Mike Elliott spoke at the press conference on the killing of Daunte Wright. Both the officer who shot Wright and the Brooklyn Center police chief resigned.

At one point during the presser, one woman spoke up and said the police need to show a greater level of “empathy, sympathy, and compassion.”

“If it was your kid, how would you feel? What would you do?!” she asked. “And you all keep traumatizing us over and over again.”

She told the police officials they need to more than to just “wrap your mind around” the trauma families like hers have been dealing with for years.

“No more racial profiling!” she continued. “No more just ’cause he’s Black, ’cause he’s brown. No more! I’m sick and I’m tired!… It’s people like you that causes us to suffer.”

“You can take the trash out, but it has a way of recycling itself and coming right back. I am tired of it! Get rid of the trash, mayor!

Minutes later, one man told the mayor, “He got pulled over because he was Black behind the wheel of that car. Those tags were just an entryway into that car. Normally it’s ‘I smell weed in the car’ or ‘you didn’t hit your blinker’ or ‘your brake light doesn’t work.'”

“And when I watched that video on the screen, it reminded me of my friend Philando Castile,” the man continued. “It was triggering.”

“What can you do going forward to make sure that this racial profiling — ’cause right now Brooklyn Center looks like a sundown town. Black people better not be driving through here after sundown,” he continued. “I can be racially profiled and killed!”

He implored the new police chief in particular to seriously think about policing practices and racial profiling, saying, “I don’t want to fail another young man. We failed George Floyd, we failed Daunte, we failed Philando, I don’t want to fail nobody else this summer.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.

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Josh Feldman is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Email him here: josh@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter: @feldmaniac