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On the roadside in Brooklyn Center, the officers asked Mr. Wright to step out of his car. But when Officer Luckey went to handcuff him, Mr. Wright pulled away and got back into the driver’s seat, where he struggled with Officer Luckey and a sergeant who had been called to the scene.

Police body cameras recorded Ms. Potter shouting “Taser! Taser! Taser!” immediately before firing a fatal bullet from her Glock handgun. Mr. Wright, mortally wounded, said “ah, he shot me,” and his car lurched forward, crashing into an oncoming car a short way down the block. He was pronounced dead at the scene. In the videos, Ms. Potter is heard saying that she had drawn the wrong weapon and is seen collapsing to the ground. “What have I done?” she asks at one point.

The killing of Mr. Wright, a father who had recently been working at a shoe store, happened while the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who was later convicted of murdering George Floyd, was in progress. It set off several nights of intense protests in Brooklyn Center, during which the police arrested hundreds of people.

Criminal charges against police officers who kill while on duty remain rare, and convictions even more so.

Instances of “weapons confusion” have also been rare. Even so, in the last two decades, at least three officers have been convicted in cases where they said they had confused a gun with a Taser, including two cases in which the person they shot died.