Daunte Wright is dead. And he shouldn’t be. It really is that simple, and to equivocate or make excuses for his death is wrong morally, but it also is to misunderstand the nature of policing in a democracy and what it can be today. According to scholarly historian Gary Potter, policing in the United States started as a volunteer force and then grew to an organized group tasked with protecting the interests of the shipping industry in the North and those who profited from slavery in the South. In its early years, policing wasn’t really about the public interest.