788967F7-C0F5-4095-B48C
Universally Unique!
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User ID: 682
788967F7-C0F5-4095-B48C
Universally Unique!
6mo ago
If we assume a fixed fact pattern for the encounter, yeah, it makes sense that prior encounters the officers weren't aware of can't change whether or not their reaction was justified. Of course, his being a ICU nurse or whatever is also irrelevant from that standpoint.
However, it seems like in a lot of situations like this, what the facts of the matter were (and which are important) is at least a little ambiguous. Our interpretation of events is colored by the purported character of the parties involved and the narratives at play. Was he a trained nurse trying to help a woman in need or an armed, repeated belligerent trying to 'micro intifada' a fellow insurrectionist and subsequently resist arrest?
There's also a broader question: much of the left's rhetorical framing around police violence is "it could happen to you & your loved ones." But, in point of fact, neither I nor any of my loved ones have made a hobby of harassing police. If violence is only dolled out to folks engaged in blatantly lawless actions or even just those ambiguously-right-at-the-boundary-of-protected protest, then I have absolutely nothing to fear from law enforcement, since I have never deliberately impeded the lawful discharge of their duties and, absent an open civil war or blatantly genocidal actions, can not imagine I'd ever do so.
The framing in that last paragraph is really important to understand the 'auth' reaction to a lot of this. If there are bright-line rules that serve a legitimate state interest, that are easy to know and be on the right side of, that rarely harm anyone but repeated, anti-social malfeasors... well, empathy is a limited resource — both psychologically and especially in terms of informing policy — and there are many who are more deserving.
On the general principle: Is your claim that anytime a LEO crosses in front of or behind a vehicle with a suspect in the driver's seat they are throwing away any legitimate interest in not being ran-over? That if the suspect decides to flee, it may be unfortunate that they had to drive over an officer to do so, but that that's fundamentally the officer's fault and not a charge the suspect should face? No one seems to want to describe themselves as believing in a right-to-flee or arrest-only-after-fair-combat but it's really hard for me to make sense of this impulse otherwise.
Let's disregard the vehicle for a moment and say cops are arresting someone in their home. They position themselves in the front, where they announce themselves, but also have an officer in the back. My understanding is that if the suspect barrels through the cop in the back door that this is both an assault the suspect will be charged with and grounds for the officer to use any reasonable force to defend himself and subdue the suspect. This remains true even though we know suspects sometimes flee and that this tactic creates a heightened risk for a violent encounter between a fleeing suspect and the police.
If the suspect is running at the cop with a shotgun, the cop has a reasonable fear for his life and has every right to shoot the suspect to end that threat. Perhaps the suspect just liked holding the shotgun casually in his home (exercising his strongly-protected second amendment rights!) or was worried that some rival gang were pretending to be police or whatever and had no desire to shoot true cops. These circumstances have no bearing on whether the officer had a reasonable belief of the threat nor the legality or morality of his subsequent actions.
I get that Garner has no force if a cop can hold a gun to his own head and say, "If you don't surrender, the shame from failure to apprehend you shall drive me to suicide, consequently I have a legitimate fear for my life and can now use deadly force." But happening to be in front of a parked car is... absolutely not like that. There are lots of legitimate investigatory and safety reasons an officer might want to be in front of the vehicle, and even more reasons to briefly cross the front or back of the vehicle to navigate from one side to another. And being around a parked vehicle is not (barring freak circumstances) dangerous until the driver takes a positive action to, at best, recklessly endanger the officer. Actions that the driver, very notably, has no right to take.
Police agencies advise officers to avoid loitering in front of vehicles because suspects sometimes take illegal, positive actions that gravely endanger the officer. These policies in no way, legally or morally, transfer responsibility of the suspect's actions to the officer or undermine his right to defend himself from violence. To say otherwise is textbook victim blaming.
In this specific case: While the general principle is very clear and backed by extensive caselaw, the facts of this particular incident are even more damning. (A few videos for anyone who wants to check my description.)
The agent is fully clear — several feet off to the right — of the front of the SUV when Good began to flee. She puts the car into reverse with the wheel pointed left. One second into her felony fleeing, she has repositioned the car so that it is dead-on the officer. She continues to turn in reverse, until the officer is at the center-left of the front of the car. In two seconds, he went from being in a completely normal position to the side and front of the vehicle, in no particular danger from her pulling straight forward, to being directly in her strike path, as a result of her illegal actions.
Two seconds into the commissioning of this crime, she kicks the car into drive with wheels turned still slightly left and then straight forward, directly at the officer, appears to gun the accelerator but thankfully loses traction.
The tires, for about half a second, slip in place. The vehicle is pointed directly at Ross. Without the ice on the road, it seems far more likely than not to me that Good would have completely ran him over at this moment. She continues to turn the wheels to the right, though Ross, as a result of Good's crimes, cannot see her tires at this point, only the movement of her hands on the steering wheel.
She gains traction. The vehicle begins to take off with the tires turned somewhat-but-not-at-all-fully to the right. She clips into the officer, who only after being struck with the left front of her SUV, four seconds after it began to move, fires through the windshield, and continues to fire as she begins to turn more fully away from Ross. It's unclear to me to what extent he was able to jump out of the way vs. being literally thrown by the force of the car smashing into him—look at his foot movement around the first shot.
The time from the car beginning to move to the last shot being fired is literally 5 seconds. There was no way for him to jump out of the path of the vehicle—the direction he would have needed to dive toward changed from the start of the encounter to when he was struck a couple of seconds later.
I simply do not believe a reasonable observer could look at these facts and conclude that he had baited her into a justification for deadly force or that his right to self defense should be in any way diminished by his actions.
The position is more fringe than Young Earth Creationism, polling at an all-time low of 37%. Turns out there's lots of embarrassing litmus tests for in-group loyalty! Of course, it doesn't seem like YEC—or anything more than the barest of pretend theism—has been an effective litmus since Trump took over the GOP, but back when it was relevant, we got to witness Rubio dodging with "I’m not a scientist, man."
It's like poetry... they rhyme
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