Glassnoser
7mo ago
My reaction to that fear would be to get out of the way, not to stand my ground and commit homicide.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
She literally hit him with her car. It's on video. You can just watch it. There's three different angles in the top post. He's folded over on the hood. I never cease to be amazed at the willingness of people to refuse to believe their own eyes.
It looked more to me like he leaned towards the car. But even if you're right, he didn't get run over even though he was hit. Why not? Why is he folded over the hood and sidestepping instead of getting caught under the car? Because the car was going in a different direction. That is the key fact here. He planted his feet as she drove towards him and only started to move out of the way at the very last second. Then he walked away seemingly totally fine. Why would he have done that if there was a risk of him getting run over? He could see which direction her wheel were turned in. He could see where the car was going. Yet he stayed where he was and it worked out for him. It seems to me he knew exactly what he was doing and did not think he was about to be run over, or else he would have gotten out of the way.
But this is hindsight. This is information we can gather by looking at the video from the comfort of our phones and laptops and replaying the footage until it makes sense.
It's not hindsight. It's his job. If he is going to stand in front of large vehicles and shoot their drivers, he needs to be able to quickly assess the situation. The whole scene was right in front of him. He could see her and the other officer. He knew what was going on. And if he is going to be carrying a gun and given special leeway to enforce the law with it, he needs to be held to a high standard for situational awareness, and if he felt at all not up to the task at any moment, he needed to take steps to reduce the danger he was putting himself and others in.
This is the problem with so many of these arguments defending police killings. The police are professionals who should know how to handle these types of situations and who deliberately put themselves and others into dangerous situations. They have a lot of control over the situation. They often don't need to be where they put themselves and don't need to have taken the actions that led them to the situation where they felt the need to use deadly force.
They're responsible for all reasonably foreseeable outcomes of the situations that they create. Yes, they sometimes need to quickly respond to what criminals are doing and they don't always have the option of just walking away. But they're supposed to know how to steer situations towards a reasonable outcome. Standing in front of cars when you don't know how to react to the car driving towards you is not something they should be doing.
This is like excusing a doctor from a killing a patient on the operating table because he cut open a patient without knowing how to sew him back up. Yes, of course, if you randomly find someone with his guts hanging out, you shouldn't get in trouble for not helping him, nor is it the doctor's fault that the patient is in need of the surgery in the first place. But when the doctor decides he is going to be the hero and do life saving surgery, he is responsible once he cuts the patient open. He is supposed to know what to do and if he doesn't, he needs to leave the patient alone and either find someone else to do the surgery or provide a different treatment.
The person who was shot drove herself over 500 miles from Missouri to Minneapolis, used her car to barricade a street against federal law enforcement (a federal crime), and tried to escape when they tried to arrest her, striking one of them.
Which of these decisions were the cops responsible for? How did the cops "create" this situation? I would be amazed if any law enforcement officer had told her to do any of these things!
He's responsible for standing in front of the vehicle. The doctor isn't responsible for the person getting sick, but he doesn't need to cut him open if he can't do that without killing the patient.
"I don't know the legal standard that applies, so I'm going to introduce an entirely different standard (that also may or may not apply) premised on typical assumptions towards an atypical context" is certainly a take.
You're missing the point. I'm trying to make it clear that I am not making a legal argument. I am arguing about what he should have done regardless of the law. I'm aware that the law gives undue deference to police officers in many situations and so I can make an argument about what should have happened that can be true even if what the cop did was legally defensible.
This is much less so, since it entirely depends on who 'you' are, and in what contexts. Just to take one, governments reserve the right to kill people who challenge their monopoly on legal violence, whether that challenger personally threatens a representative or not. And this does not go into the rights to kill people who are threatening other people, whether members of the public or other agents of the government, let alone matters of perception of threat.
Obviously, that's why I prefaced my argument in the way that I did. It's useful to take as a starting point what an ordinary person would be required to do. I'm sure Minnesota law gives more leeway to police officers in this situation. They have certain responsibilities others don't. But it's useful to make explicit what those differences are to see if they apply in this situation, legally or morally. I don't think any of those responsibilities or any leeway the law might reasonably give the police should excuse what happened in this case.
Why do you believe* the cop 'easily' got out of the way, as opposed to 'nimbly' when a slight difference of balance or attention would have not gotten out of the way?
Because he pushed things to the absolute limit, planting his feet while she backed up, drawing his gun when she started driving towards him, and then finally dodging the car at the very last moment as she reached him. He had ample room to manoeuvre and his decision to use it all shows how well he knew that.
Moreover, why do you believe 'easily' matters at all? If you are conceeding the officer was in the way of an accelerating vehicle, it does not matter if the were 'barely' or not. Being in the way is a binary state- you either are, or you are not, and if so then it validates perception of threat.
The level of threat matters. His fellow police officers could snap at any second and shoot him in the head. Does that mean he should kill them all at the first opportunity? His wife could have a psychotic break and kill him in his sleep. Does he need to kill her first?
The probablity of something happening matters a great deal. The fact that he could easily get out of the way means that the threat was very low. He had the option to move out of the way. He did move out of the way before firing despite waiting before doing so.
*Aside from the framing bias effect of the slow-motion video formats going around, which is a format that is typically used to exagerate to the audience how much time was on hand to process events, and use that implication as an anchoring bias to shape future considerations?
I had only seen the video at full speed when I wrote the comment above. If he didn't have enough time to process things, he shouldn't have put himself in that situation. Many people are pointing out that this has happened a number of times to police officers already. If he is putting himself in front of the car to stop it, he must have some preconceived idea of how to handle this kind of situation. I think he had lots of time to make his decisions. It's also the nature of the job to make such quick decisions. Incompetence is not an excuse.
Getting run over by a car can potentially seriously injur someone regardless of what part of the car does so.
He was not at risk of being run over, and even if he had been, if it's so dangerous, what was he doing in front of the car in the first place?
In turn, the wheels were turning multiple directions in the event, including in directions that would- by your own admission- put the officer in the way.
I'm not sure where I admitted that. The wheels turned to the right immediately when she started forward.
Why do you believe she was 'clearly' not trying to run him over, from his perspective?
Because she was making a sharp right turn.
Remember, perception matters in self defense and use of force. Even if 'you' would have clearly felt she was not trying to run 'you' over if you were in his position, that would merely mean it would be unjustified murder for 'you' to have shot her.
Yes, but the perception has to be reasonable, and as a police officer who decided to stand in front of a vehicle to try to stop it, creating an uncertain and dangerous situation where he didn't know what the level of threat was, his ability to rely on that perception is severly undermined.
'I wouldn't have felt afraid for my life if I were in their position' is irrelevant even if true. Reasonable person standards for perception don't enable a veto even by a reasonable person, because reasonable people can disagree.
I'm not claiming a veto. I'm arguing what I think is reasonable.
Why do you believe there was no perceived risk to anyone to people who just perceived risk to themselves?
I didn't say there was no perceived risk. I said there was no actual risk. I don't know why he would have thought there was at that point. If he perceived any risk, it would not have been reasonable and cannot be relied upon for a self-defence claim.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
The car turned away from him, and had already done so when he fired. He would not have been dragged under.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
The car wasn't stolen and the plates weren't hidden. But even if they had been, why wouldn't it better for the police to simply pursue the car, stop it, pull her out, and arrest her normally? This is done all the time. What about that causes society to be unstable? It's not a get out of jail free card. It's just dealing with the situation in a way that is unnecessarily harmful to the suspect.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
That's quite different than saying he's going to forcibly remove federal agents from the city.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
If the choice is between a potential armed standoff where someone might be killed (and almost certainly won't be) and definitely killing her, definitely killing her seems like the much worse choice. It has the added benefit of not forcing a split-second decision. Remember, we're talking about someone who it appears didn't do anything other than block a lane of traffic. Would an armed standoff have been worth doing to arrest her? I don't see why they can't charge her and just wait until there is a safe opportunity to arrest her. It doesn't have to be immediate. It doesn't have to be that day or that week. Nothing about this was so serious and urgent that anyone's life had to be put at risk. This wasn't a live shooter, it was a middle-aged woman blocking a lane on a quiet residential street.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
My understanding is that police are generally told not to stand in front of cars and shoot the drivers to try to stop them because it's dangerous and it doesn't work, as you can see in this video. After she was shot, the car continued forward until it crashed into a parked car. So he went against the standard police procedure, killed someone, and failed to stop the car.
I don't know how often. But I've read about it a few times in the news.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/supreme-court-kilmar-abrego-garcia-1.7507521
There are more, but these are the two I remember best.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
It's hard to tell how much contact there was from the videos. But it looks like he leaned towards the car as she drove away and it brushed against him. He seemed perfectly fine afteward. That's not even him being run over, let alone her trying to do so. She turned her wheels pretty sharply to the right as soon as she started driving away, all while another officer was trying to open her door while her window was open. If she didn't execute this perfectly, she had a good excuse.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
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I don't know the law, but there must be some limits on what the police can do to put themselves into dangerous situations. For example, a police officer cannot leap into the path of a vehicle driving down the road and shoot the law-abiding driver. The only reason I can think of that the duty to flee would not apply to a police officer is that they must remain present to ensure the safety of others. Police are not supposed to stand in front of cars to try to stop them. I would be surprised if that didn't somehow undermine the self-defence argument. No part of what he did contributed to anyone's safety. Everyone would have been better off with him not in front of the vehicle. Shooting her didn't even help to stop the car. Had he remained in front of the car, he still would been hit.
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Fleeing was safely possible. We know this because he safely fled, even after delaying his attempt to do so until the very last second, even leaning over the hood to ensure he got a good shot of her face. I can see how he might not have realized in the split second between the car moving and when he fired, but the car was not aimed at him nor accelerating towards him. It began aimed at him and turned away from him. He was clear of the car when he took his first shot.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
You are assuming he knew the intent you are giving her (ie that she was going to flee). He didn’t know which direction she was going to drive and thus how difficult it would be to dodge.
I'm not saying he knew. I'm saying that he should have known her intent. If he had any reason to think it would be difficult to ascertain her intent and that that ambiguity would lead him to take her life as a precaution, he should not have stepped in front of the vehicle, and having stepped in front of the vehicle, he should have gotten out of the way at the earliest opportunity when he saw that she was going to start moving the car. What reasonable goal was he hoping to accomplish by standing in front of the car, putting both of their lives at risk?
A crazy woman decided to barricade a road to prevent ICE from operating. She was refusing multiple orders and when another agent was trying to apprehend her, she backed up and then put the car into gear to drive forward.
We don't know that she was crazy and she wasn't barricading the road. She blocked one lane on a wide street. You can see a car drive past her in the video.
Regardless, even if this were all true, it doesn't mean she needed to die. He had a responsibility to minimize that risk. Someone being crazy is not an excuse to have them killed. It calls for all the more caution. If he knew she was crazy, that makes all the more irresponsible to stand in front of her vehicle while she was in the driver's seat.
Is it reasonable in that context to fear she might do something crazy like drive at him? Yes. In fact she did.
Yes, and the appropriate response to that is to get out of the way, not to create a situation in which he feels the need to kill someone.
Is it crazy for him to be ready to draw his gun to neutralize the target? No.
Not so long as he doesn't kill her unnecessarily, which he ended up doing. He should be actively avoiding situations where he might need to draw his weapon unless he has to be there. Nothing was accomplished by his standing in front of her car.
Even after he had made the decision to put himself in that dangerous situation, the presumption should have been that she wasn't going to run him over. Of course it was possible. But it was unlikely. If the choice is between certainly killing her and a small possiblity that she injured him (there is no way his life was in danger at that low speed), he needed to take the risk. His series of mistakes leading up to that dangerous situation doesn't give him an excuse to kill her.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
The U.S. government is using the military to summarily execute people outside of a military conflict. That is illegal. The excuse is that they are alleged drug dealers. The correct and legal response to that is to present evidence for probable cause to a judge, get a warrant, and then arrest them, then to put them on trial, present evidence that proves them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and have a judge sentence them for some prison term.
They are not allowed to kill them at any point in this process. They are not allowed to do anything to them based on a mere suspicion of a crime being committed. They have presented no evidence, and the alleged crimes are not even within the jurisdiction of the United States. We know from experience that a quarter of suspected drug boats aren't even carrying drugs. Nonetheless, even proof that they are really drug boats or even proof that they are not only drug boats but smuggling drugs into the United States would not excuse what they've been doing.
If it is a military conflict, they need to get congressional approval. The only law that would give them the right to act unilaterally would be if they were attacking the United States, because the executive branch has the power to act in defence of the United States. Smuggling cocaine is not an act of war. So that is not sufficient.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
I didn't say force was impermissible here. I said killing her was impermissible. He wasn't trying to use force to arrest her. He shot her in order to kill her.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
The part about being polite, no I guess not. But the thing about the hand positions sounds strange to me. I guess it's because guns are so common in the United States. Here in Canada, it's not really something anyone ever worries about because they're largely illegal.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Yeah, I watched it again, and she clearly intended to turn right from the very beginning. Her wheels started turning at the same time that she started moving forward. That's also the moment the cop pulled out his gun. So I can see how he might have thought she might have been about to drive at him when he decided to pull out his gun. However, by the time he pulled the trigger, she was well into her turn and it should have been clear to him what she was trying to do.
What you can also see if you watch carefully is that, as she was backing up, he started getting ready to take his gun out while standing still. He had a chance to get out of the way, but decided that in the case where she did drive at him, it would be better for him to kill her than to have gotten out of the way and let her escape.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
I don't think it's right to characterize this as so unexpected as to excuse the result of his decision. He's a trained police officer who chose to stand in front of a vehicle and to use his gun to try to stop it. He put someone's life in his hands and therefore needed to be able to quickly react to all reasonably foreseeable outcomes. He could have looked at her tires to see she was already turning the other way. He needed to not panic. He needed to not shoot once the apparent threat was gone. If he couldn't handle that kind of situation, he needed to not put himself in one.
Even if she had been trying to run him over, the car continued for some distance afterward until it slammed into a parked car. How would him shooting her have protected himself?
It was a wholly preventable death and if his best defence shows that he was incompetent, then he should at least be guilty of manslaughter.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
This is not a charitable characterization of what he said. He said they're allowed to refuse illegal orders. Someone else in the video said they must refuse illegal orders, which I think is more accurate. I think this was in reference to the boat bombings, including bombing the second strike on the survivors of one of them.
These seem to be clearly illegal. I haven't seen any arguments about how they could be legal.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Governor Walz is now threatening to use the Minnesota National Guard to remove federal agents from the city, setting the stage for conflicting guard federalizations and call up orders
I Googled this and cannot find any mention of it.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Even under the most charitable assumptions for the police, there was at most a small chance she was trying to run him over. I don't think it's unreasonable to say the police cannot always kill someone just because they think the person might be trying to kill them. I also think the police have a duty to avoid unnecessarily creating situations where they don't know whether someone is about to kill them if they're going to respond to that uncertainty by killing someone.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Not immediately executing someone for doing something is not the same as allowing them to do it.
How it could be any other way is that the police don't stand in front of vehicles to try to stop them from driving away and if they drive away against police orders, they can use a number of other safe techniques for pursuing and arresting them. Standing in front of cars and shooting the drivers is way down the list of preferred options for stopping vehicles and was easily avoidable in this situation.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
They sometimes deport legal immigrants not in accordance with the law though.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
The cop was standing in front of the left side of the vehicle. She turned her wheels sharply to the right to go to his right.
The gun analogy is absurd. Guns are for killing people. Someone pointing a gun at you has a clear intention of killing you. Someone driving in your general direction is almost certainly not trying to injure you. You just happen to be possibly in their way.
I've mostly been watching the full speed videos, so this is quite interesting. But I think it strengthens my argument. As the car backs up, he reaches for his gun, the second the wheel starts spinning, he begins to draw his weapon he also steps slight to his right and plants his foot. By the time his foot hits the ground, the car has started to move towards him and he points his gun at her. The car also starts turning its wheels to the right as soon as it starts moving forward.
Then he takes a second, bigger step to the right and it's hard to see what's going on because now the view is blocked by the other officer, but it looks like he's trying to keep his torso in the original position in order to keep his aim. So now he's leaning hard to his left with just his right foot outstretched to prepare to dodge the car. At some point around this time he also starts leaning over the hood. It also looks like his centre of mass is just at the left edge of the car, and only because he's leaning to his left to keep it there.
At this point, the car is turning sharply and is moments away from being totally clear of him. He pushes away with his left foot, clearing the car completely with the exception of his upper torso which just barely leaning on the hood the hood of the car as it turns sharply away. He's a moment away from losing sight of the windshield when he pulls the trigger and takes his first shot. There is a photo of the car's windshield that shows the bullet hole way off to the driver's side, meaning he had to have take the shot from the side of the car, not from the front. And from the video it does look like he had just cleared the car when he fired.
Then he's standing next to the driver's side door as the car is now driving away from him and he takes two more shots through the open driver's side window.
I really cannot see how anyone can defend the second and third shots because the car is clearly driving away from him at that point and he is no longer even in front of the car.
The first shot is debateable. The car is in front of him, but just barely, and by that point, it's clearly in the middle of turning away from. He avoids with a small twisting motion pulling his left leg out of the way. He had already begun to move out of the way and was only still in front of the car because he was leaning to the left to get a clear shot of the driver. But this all happened very quickly. Just before this, the car was aimed at him and it might not have been clear what it was about to do.
Still, I think he had lots of time to move out of the way. Pulling out his gun and shooting her was pointless and accomplished nothing but killing her. It did not protect him from the car. He could have used that time to get out of the way, but he focused on drawing his weapon and trying to get a shot. He also shouldn't have been standing there in the first place.
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