Outcome reached in Kim Potter trial over Daunte Wright's death

Kim Potter was emotional on the witness stand as she described the fatal traffic stop. She shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright, who was being arrested by officers and attempted to flee. 

"I remember a struggle with Officer [Anthony] Luckey and the driver at the door," Potter testified. "The driver was trying to get back into the car … I went around Officer Luckey as they're trying to get back in the door."

She added, "They're still struggling and I can see Officer Johnson and the drivers struggling over the gearshifts because I can see Johnson's hand and then I can see his face."

She then described Sgt. Mychal Johnson, who was holding Wright from the passenger side of the car. 

"He had a look of fear on his face -- nothing I'd seen before," she said. "We're trying to keep him from driving away. It just went chaotic. And then I remember yelling, 'Taser, Taser, Taser,' and nothing happened and then [Wright] told me I shot him."

Kim Potter said she would not have stopped Wright over the air freshener nor the expired registration tabs if she were not field training.

"An air freshener, to me, is not just an equipment violation," she testified. "The COVID times, the high COVID times, the Department of Motor Vehicles was so offline that people weren't getting tabs and we were advised not to try to enforce a lot of those things because the tabs were just not in circulation. Part of field training is that my probationer would make numerous contacts with the public throughout the day," she said, regarding Officer Anthony Luckey, who she was training at the time.

She said that traffic stops can be dangerous for police officers.

"Sometimes there's guns in the car," she testified. "Sometimes there's uncooperative people, you don't know who you're stopping."

Kim Potter said she rarely took her Taser out and doesn't believe she ever deployed it. 

She testified that she sometimes took her Taser out to de-escalate a situation "or to prepare for what might be behind the door. Sometimes an officer has a gun and sometimes an officer has a Taser out."

She said she received her new Taser almost a month before the fatal killing of Daunte Wright. She also said the training she had at the department was focused more on firearms than on Tasers.

Kim Potter was asked about her background with the Brooklyn Center Police Department. She was hired in 1995, making her a 26-year veteran of the department.

She was a field training officer for at least 10 years, she testified. 

She said she was a field training officer because she "felt that I had knowledge and mentorship that I could help young officers develop into somebody I would want to work and my partners would want to work with."

She was serving as a field training officer when she fatally shot Wright.

She was also on the domestic abuse response team, serving as a crisis negotiator within the domestic abuse program. 

"Officers would go out on domestic abuse situations or domestic calls and if there was a victim of a crime or an arrest made -- or not an arrest made -- we would follow up the next day with the victims to see that they were getting the things they needed like domestic advocates, walking them through getting order for protections that they had questions, and then helping them, and checking in with them through the court process," she testified. 

As a crisis negotiator, Potter said she would respond to calls where people may be in danger to negotiate with the subject and get them to submit to being arrested.

She had also worked in crime prevention work and said she received a Taser and firearm training.