Daunte Wright protests

Protests and civil disorder occurred in reaction to the killing of Daunte Wright on April 11, 2021. Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by police officer Kimberly Potter during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, United States. Protests that first began in Brooklyn Center spread to other locations in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area and then to other cities in the United States. Several nights of civil disorder in Brooklyn Center and adjacent cities resulted in sporadic looting and damage to several hundred properties, including four businesses that were set on fire.

Wright's death came during a prolonged period of unrest in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area over police brutality and racial injustice, notably due to the murder of George Floyd and the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered Floyd. Protesters demanded justice for Wright's death and made several demands of public officials, including a more severe murder charge for Potter, an independent investigation of the shooting, and enactment of police reform measures.

In mid-April 2021, many local protests were held outside the Brooklyn Center police station on Humboldt Avenue. Law enforcement established a heavily fortified barrier area and periodically clashed with demonstrators over several days. Demonstrators made several attempts to overrun the security barrier established around the police station during a few nights of tense protests. Law enforcement fired tear gas and less-lethal munitions into the crowds. Protesters later demanded that criminal charges be dropped against demonstrators over Wright's death, and that law enforcement discontinue aggressive crowd control methods. In three separate incidents, law enforcement and Minnesota National Guard troops had gunshots fired at them during civil disorder in the week after Wright's death.

Protests resumed in late 2021 during Potter's criminal trial with most demonstrations concentrated in downtown Minneapolis near a court building. A jury convicted Potter of first-degree and second-degree manslaughter charges on December 23, 2021. Protests were held as a reaction to Potter's prison sentence, which was for two years rather than the seven years requested by the state, and a few instances of looting took place in Brooklyn Center and Minneapolis.

Daunte Wright was an unarmed, 20-year-old biracial Black man, who was fatally shot by Brooklyn Center police officer Kimberly Potter during an altercation at a traffic stop on April 11, 2021, on 63 Avenue North in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Police said Potter had meant to use her Taser but accidentally used a handgun.

Brooklyn Center is a city in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, bordering Minneapolis to the north. It had a population of nearly 31,000 residents by 2021, and it had transformed from a mostly White suburb to one of the most diverse areas in the region over the previous decades with most of its residents people of color. The city was also one of the poorest in Hennepin County; 15 percent of residents lived below the federal poverty level. In 2019, voters elected Mike Elliot, a Liberian-American, to be the city's first person-of-color mayor. By the time of Wright's death, most of the city's police force were White, and no officers lived within the city's boundaries.

Wright's killing was the sixth by Brooklyn Center police officers since 2012, and all but one were of persons of color. At least 207 people have been killed by law enforcement in Minnesota between 2000 and 2021, according to a local newspaper database. Wright's death became the third high-profile death of a Black man in the Minneapolis area over the preceding five years during a police encounter. In 2016, Philando Castile was shot to death by a police officer during a traffic stop in the nearby city of Falcon Heights, and Floyd was murdered in 2020. The fatal shooting of Justine Damond, a White woman, by a Black Minneapolis police officer in 2017 also resulted in controversy, and a conviction of third-degree murder and manslaughter for the officer that shot her. The fatal shooting of Jamar Clark by a Minneapolis police officer during an arrest in 2015, and the exchange of gunfire with Minneapolis police that left Dolal Idd dead during an attempted sting operation in December 2020, were also sources of controversy and protests over the killing of Black men.

In 2020 and 2021, the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan region experienced a prolonged period of protests and intermittent unrest over issues of police brutality and racial justice, beginning soon after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Three nights of riots and looting from May 27 to May 30, 2020, resulted in two deaths, 617 arrests, and upwards of $500 million in property damage to 1,500 locations in the metropolitan region, making it the second-most destructive period of local unrest in United States history, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. During the unrest, on May 28, 2020, a Minneapolis police station was overrun by demonstrators and set on fire.