In two shootings a decade apart, police said officers confused their Tasers and guns

In 2009, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant, later claiming he had meant to use his Taser and not his gun. In April 2021, Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter shot and killed Daunte Wright — and police say this, too, was due to getting the less-lethal weapon and the gun confused. To get a better sense of how much these two shootings blamed on Taser confusion more than a decade apart have in common, and how the trial of Derek Chauvin is changing the conversation about killings by law enforcement, we hear from journalist Demian Bulwa, now director of news at the San Francisco Chronicle, who covered Oscar Grant’s death and Johannes Mehserle’s trial extensively.

Civic · Laura Wenus, Liana Wilcox, Mel Baker