Glassnoser
7d ago
Your visual cortex processes things effectively instantaneously. It doesn't take seconds to know what you're looking at.
Glassnoser
7d ago
Not agreed. It started backing up while he walked towards it. It was backing up as he walked in front of it.
Glassnoser
7d ago
The phone recording from the cop who shot, as well as the original footage, does suggest that she at least grazed him.
It doesn't. The point where he made contact with the vehicle is not on camera. You hear something. We already knew that the hand holding the phone likely made contact with the car. Eye witnesses report him leaning over the hood with his outstretched arms. The phone recording tells you nothing about what happened to the rest of his body at that point.
With that fairly rapid acceleration when pedestrians are that close to the car, that is very dangerous driving for sure, regardless of whether she hit him hard, grazed him, or barely missed him.
Dangerous, yes. But there is a massive gulf between driving dangerously and needing to be killed.
As a driver she is in all circumstances obligated to drive safely and not come this close to hitting people with her car, and not accelerate this fast near pedestrians.
That's not in dispute. What matters is whether the shooter was reasonable in his belief that he was subject to imminent severe bodily harm. She can drive dangerously and still not provide him with a justification for killing her.
It doesn't matter if she assumed that he had moved far enough to the side, misjudged her turning circle, pressed the go pedal too hard because she was agitated, was high on drugs, etc. Once you put someone's life in danger, they are allowed to act like their life is in danger.
It does matter because her state of mind should have informed his beliefs of the risks. If you see someone make eye contact with you and accelerate towards you, you are reasonable in believing he is trying to hit you. If you see that he doesn't see you, you are not. You can act like your life is in danger, but you cannot assume that the person is trying to hit you in order to justify killing them.
He could see that she could see where he was after she started driving forward. His assessment of the risk had to take her likely state of mind into account. If he knew that she knew he was there and still started driving in his direction, that would increase the likelihood that she was trying to hit him. If he knew that she had not known where he was when she started driving, then he could not rule out the most likely possibility that she started in his direction because she didn't know he was there.
This would have been impossible to see from the perspective of the cop in front of the car, given how close he was. He would only have been able to see the hood of the car.
I'm not convinced of that. Normally, when you're standing in front of a car, you can see its wheels, at least if you're standing far enough away, which I think he was.
He could potentially have seen the wheels pointed to the left earlier, when he was still to the side of the car, and then taken that into consideration when he saw the car moving towards him, but whether that is actually true requires knowledge of what the cop was thinking.
It is actually relevant what he should have been thinking.
Glassnoser
7d ago
A higher TFR than White Americans while only making 1/4th of their adjusted average wage is incredible.
It's not incredible. It's extremely normal and expected. Fertility rates are negatively correlated with income.
Glassnoser
7d ago
A respect for the concept of 'law' as a foundational social good that is generally best to comply with even when its not in your immediate best interests.
Then why do the police need to shoot suspects to keep them from fleeing? Maybe I misunderstood your point above.
Look... we actually saw what happens when the police are pulled back from enforcing basic rules.
I'm not suggesting they pull back from enforcing basic rules. I'm suggesting that this particular office adhere to the long-established and current practice of not standing in front of moving cars with a drawn pistol to stop them from fleeing. There are other ways of enforcing rules.
I ask you seriously. If a police officer is justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately swinging a knife in his direction (and actually cuts him, nonfatally)... is it hard to see why he might also be justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately driving a car in his direction (and actually strikes him, nonfatally)?
Yes, because it's not the same. It's a lot easier to just get out of the way of a moving car than it is to escape someone with a knife. There is a common thread in these arguments defending the shooter where they treat self-defence situations as binary. There is either a threat or there isn't. But in reality, there is always a threat. It's a question of whether the threat is sufficient. The threat posed by someone swinging a knife is much less than someone driving a car at a low speed with unclear intent.
How do you know she intended to hit him with her car? How do you know he was hit with the car?
It also matters that shooting someone driving a car is a terrible way of stopping the car, whereas it is an excellent way of stopping someone with a knife.
It's not hard for me to see how someone who ignores all of these details might think the shooting was justified. What is hard to see how is it remains justified after considering them.
Because they are a criminal with poor impulse control and foresight and in their mind, being arrested means going to jail and driving away, even if it hurts a cop, means maybe not going to jail.
Even if it works as a deterrent, there are better alternatives, which is why it's not standard police practice.
Why do you think Cops carry guns at all?
For protecting people's lives, not for preventing suspects from fleeing.
I'm simply suggesting that "police officers can treat moving vehicles like other deadly weapons" is a generally good, stance.
I know, and I disagree with that very strongly. They're not at all like other deadly weapons.
It would be like if it were normal for almost everyone to walk around with a gun, and if someone were being detained by the police and tried to run away, the fact that they had a gun on them justified shooting them. There would have to be some action taken by the suspect that made it likely that he planned on shooting the officer trying to detain him. That action could not be some small thing that had a remote chance of indicating an intention to kill.
I don't think it makes any sense to say "we can't know if the danger to the officer was real unless they actually get run over."
I didn't say that.
Glassnoser
7d ago
He has eyes. He saw her stop and then turned and faced her. A lot of people in this thread are premising their arguments on a belief in extraordinarily slow reaction times.
Glassnoser
7d ago
Sure, but 99.99% of the time, a screwdriver is not a weapon, but when somebody raised one over their head at me and I drew a firearm to defend myself, I received exactly zero legal scrutiny about my decision to do so. It's actually not all that ambiguous that something has become a weapon, so don't pretend that it is.
What do you mean it can't be ambiguous? Are you saying that you are absolutely certain Renee Good tried to run Jonathan Ross over with her car?
He was literally impacted by the vehicle
How do you know that?
When you are struck by a vehicle you have been exposed to death or great bodily harm.
I don't know what you intended to say here, but taken literally, it's obviously not true. You can be hit by a car a low speed and not be harmed.
Glassnoser
7d ago
Why does there need to be a logically consistent standard that justifies CK's death but not RG's? Why can't someone just be wrong about CK but not about RG?
Glassnoser
7d ago
It is, in fact, possible to run people over without deliberately trying to, and thus being an imminent threat regardless of intentions.
In general, yes. But given that she was in the process of turning away from him in order to drive away, it's very unlikely she would hit him unless she had done it deliberately.
If they were going through an involuntary spasm that would result in them pulling the trigger, you would be justified in shooing no matter what they intended.
The fact that you can come up with a scenario in which there would still be a threat even without the intent to do harm doesn't prove that intentions don't matter. Her intentions determine the likelihood of her hitting him with her car. She wasn't going through a involuntary spasm. She was in control of the car.
By the way, I think this example is illlustrative as almost a reductio ad absurdum. I think most people would find the ideat that, had she had an involuntary spasm, he would have been justified in shooting her, to be ridiculous. The argument is the same, as you rightly point out. And you're being consistent if you think both would be justified. But it strikes me as a totally absurd conclusion. I can't imagine that a police officer would ever shoot someone in this situation, and I think the fact that your argument justifies shooting people who have involutarily lost control of their vehicles shows how weak this self-defence claim is.
Glassnoser
7d ago
He has the prior that someone driving at him means he's about to be seriously injured or die.
My point is that that is not reasonable. He should have know that it was far more likely that she was just trying to drive away.
Doesn't matter. Many non-compliant criminals have become deadly threats to officers despite showing no aggression or threatening behavior.
It doesn't matter. You keep trying to argue this as though the police have the right to assume the worst and respond accordingly. They don't.
Her behaviour was evidence of being non-threatening. He doesn't need abssolute proof that she wouldn't have hurt him in order to not be justified in killing him. No police officer ever has that. You cannot pull someone over for speeding and shoot them in the head just because sometimes people who get pulled over for speeding are dangerous.
When a robber pulls a gun on you, you have the prior that most robbers only use guns as intimidation tools. But you are not required to be able to justify the idea that he is trying to kill you. You are allowed to just shoot him.
You absolutely have to justify it. It's just very easy to justify. Someone driving a car in your general direction is not remotely similar in how threatening it is.
The risk of falling under the wheels and getting crushed? Slow speed only reduces that risk if the driver is going to put their foot on the brake and stop, and the ICE officer has no way of knowing that she is going to do that. In fact, she was actually accelerating quickly and only moved little or not much at all because of the ice.
No, the risk of being killed by being hit by the car.
If he's fleeing or escaping, then it justifies shooting to stop him from fleeing since he is a deadly threat to others, per Tennessee v. Garner.
There has to be an actual risk to others. It can't just be hypothetical or else that would always justify shooting fleeing suspects, which we know is not allowed.
He pulled out his gun because she was an immediate deadly threat to him. And I fail to see how standing in front of the vehicle unjustifiably escalates the situation. She does not have the right to flee, after all.
She does have the right to flee without being shot. He does not have the right to make it so that she cannot flee without creating a sufficient threat to him that he would be justified in shooting her.
It unjustifiably escalated the situation because she died as a result when he could have not gotten in the way. You say he pulled out his gun because she was a threat. He pulled out the gun before she started driving forward. If she was a threat with him standing there, why wasn't the alternative, what he is trained to do, of standing somewhere where she would not have been a threat, have been better?
That is a very bad tactical mistake. Thankfully, the law does not force you to wait in order to be sure that you have legal standing to defend yourself from a first attempt on your life.
It being a bad tactical mistake doesn't make the alternative justifiable. The police cannot take all precautions to protect themselves regardless of the risk to others. If that means that standing in front of a moving vehicle is too dangerous, then he always has the option of following the standard police practice and not doing that.
It isn't a bad tactical mistake anyway, because as we saw, he did not succeed in stopping the car.
"Waiting" here implies that you know that there is a deadly threat but... you just can't do anything about it yet?
Right. There is much less leeway when you created the dangerous situation for yourself unnecessarily. In order for him to stand in front of a moving car, he had to have a much higher bar for determining that there was a threat.
Did you ever think through how a self-defender would actually perceive a situation as it unfolds? Either they see a deadly threat or they don't. If they do see a deadly threat, they are allowed to use deadly force as quickly as possible, until it is no longer a threat.
It's not binary. There are always low probability deadly threats everywhere. Their probabilities rise and fall continuously. He needed to wait until it reached a certain level before killing her.
There's no scenario in which the self-defender would think to wait just in case it's not a deadly threat.
That's what they're already doing 99.999999% of the time.
Officers have no duty to retreat, and even in states with such a duty to retreat for private citizens, you're only required to retreat if it can be done in complete safety.
They absolutely do have a duty to retreat in some situations.
Glassnoser
7d ago
There is a flaw in this reasoning though. If the US needs Greenland for its defence because it doesn't trust Denmark, then Denmark shouldn't trust the US either, and there is no reason for them to give up territory to help the US with its mutual defence.
Glassnoser
7d ago
This is the special police officer use of force statute, not the regular self-defense one (which also applies).
I don't think that's correct. I don't see where it says it's limited to the police.
However, the conditions here are satisfied, since fleeing a peace officer (609.487) is an offense and shooting, while it may not have prevented him being hit, did stop that offense.
The offence is not fleeing the police. The offence would be hitting him with her car.
Glassnoser
7d ago
Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?
No, I don't.
This is the problem right here. You get to watch it as many times as you want, while he can only go through the situation one time. If he was able to replay the situation exactly as it played out, I'm sure he could have made decisions that didn't involve shooting her.
I don't need to watch it to think about what I would have done in that situation. I only need to have watched it to figure out what he would have already known having been there.
You die in the game a lot and only beat the game after several attempts at playing the exact same situations over and over again. But of course, real life is not a video game, and when someone's life is on the line it's justified for them to use deadly force in response to an imminent deadly threat, even if you can make an argument that they didn't have to (because you can always make that argument for every scenario under the sun).
Being a police officer is not like playing a video game. You are not supposed to put yourself into dangerous situations where people's lives are on the line unneccessarily. You are supposed to do what you can to avoid those situations. Video games are designed to have high rates of failure. Policing is not.
His training and situational awareness should have been sufficient for him to avoid killing anyone in the vast majority of similar situations. He should have taken steps to make the situation as safe as possible.
Glassnoser
7d ago
Again, there is no law that says that it must be reasonable to think that your response would have stopped the threat.
Yes, there is. That's what it means for something to be necessary to prevent the threat.
A guy is pointing a gun at you, and you throw a coffee mug at him. You can throw your phone. You can throw your pen, or call him obscenities, or kick dirt at him. All of those things are legally justified, because once you are faced with an imminent deadly threat, basically everything is allowed (besides things that could cause harm to innocent people), up to and including your own deadly force.
No, that is not correct. Not everything is allowed. It must be necessary to stop the threat. If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them.
Now obviously, it is not reasonable to think that you throwing a coffee mug had any chance of stopping him, and in no universe could a coffee mug have come even close to ending the threat. So does that mean that your self-defense claim falls apart if you throw the coffee mug, and you could be charged with assault?
It's a bad example because throwing a coffee mug could help.
So I want to focus on a different point, which is that you seem to be assuming that the officer knew or should have known that she was going to move her car in that way, justifying your argument that he could have simply just stepped out of the way. This is an argument that can only be made with perfect 20/20 hindsight.
No. If he was able to recognize the threat in time to take out his gun, he could have moved out of the way instead.
It is extraordinarily difficult to predict, in the moment, which path a vehicle is going to take.
It's not that difficult. I grant that it may be somewhat difficult. But I don't think you appreciate that the evidence against him is cumulative. If the entire case against him hinged on him judging the direction of travel of the car, then I would agree that he should not be found guilty. But there are too many problems with his self-defence claim. The fact that he probably should have recognized which way the car was going is just one of a number of problems, all of which need to be overcome in order for him to claim self-defence.
You seem to think that he has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario at every point in order to justify self-defence, when in reality, the totality of the evidence needs to rise to a certain level.
But it would be unreasonable to expect him to know that she's now going to go forward, especially given that this all happened so quickly.
No, it wasn't unreasonable. She was obviously in the middle of a two part turn. Why else would she be backing up?
He doesn't even need to know which way car was going to go. He just needs to recognize the possibility that she would try to drive forward and that should have been enough for him not to walk in front of the car, as he was trained not to do.
As we saw at Derek Chauvin's trial, what counts as reasonable behaviour for a police officer is determined by what his training is and what the standard procedure is, both of which if violated at multiple points.
In general, drivers who are non-compliant are very unpredictable and can easily maneuver their vehicles in whichever direction they want.
Then what was he doing standing and blocking the car?
If you view things with hindsight, you can always make an argument that the officers could have avoided "putting themselves in harm's way".
It's not relevant what we know in hindsight. What matters is what he should have known in the situation. He knew that he could have not stood in front of the car. He knew that he could have kept walking to get out of the way. He knew that once the car started moving he could have stepped to the side. He knew that shooting the car didn't have any chance of stopping it. He knew that shooting through the driver's side window when the car was passing him (which we now know was where the fatal shot was taken from) did not prevent any threat. And he knew any possible threat was gone by then.
Glassnoser
7d ago
No, he doesn't. He needs to show that the threat was imminent. Had the vehicle been completely stationary for the entirety of the interaction, there would be no argument in the universe that she was an imminent threat. But she moved the car, and in such a way that he was in its path.
The fact that she wasn't trying run him over means that it wasn't an imminent threat. The fact that he should have known that she wasn't trying to run him over means it wasn't reasonable for him to think it was an imminent threat.
Intentions don't really matter here. If a robber points a gun at you, most of the time they are not intending to pull the trigger, and are merely using it as intimidation. However, you are still allowed to shoot him. You do not have to prove that he was intending on shooting you.
Intentions absolutely do matter. If you knew with absolutely certainty that he would not pull the trigger, then you would not be justified in shooting him. Every situation has some risk of someone causing severe bodily harm, but in order to rise to the level that justifies killing someone, the risk needs to be at a certain level. That always requires a judgment about someone's intentions.
Someone driving a car very rarely intends on running someone over. The presumption should always be that any given driver is not trying to kill someone. For Ross to be justified in killing Renee, he needed to form a reasonable belief that she may have intended to injure him.
Glassnoser
12d ago
Fine. I don't see what that has to do with it.
Glassnoser
12d ago
This is extremely vague. I don't know what you're talking about.
My defense, which I've never seen anything approaching a reasonable answer for, is simply to hold up a mirror. The tools to enact the resolution mechanism for this situation- when US law has broken so far down- is explicitly provided for in that law, though it's certainly an ugly business when it occurs.
What mirror? What US law? What resolution mechanism?
I saw it mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the people who were about to lose indeed started sounding the alarm to put the brakes on the trafficking- it was even enough for the legislature to do its job for the first time that term, though of course that was mostly just so they could claim "the other side wouldn't compromise".
About to lose what? What did the legislature do?
I wouldn't accept a conditional surrender like that either if I knew I was going to win, especially not a half-assed one that sidestepped most of the problem's causes.
What are you calling a conditional surrender? If you knew you were going to win what?
I have no idea how any of this relates to what you quoted.
Glassnoser
12d ago
He was walking towards the front of the car. He would have gotten in front of it whether or not she had been turning or not. Once she stopped moving, he stopped to turn and face her, having positioned himself directly in front of the driver's seat. He could easily have kept walking and been clear of the car in half a second. He could easily have turned back to avoid getting in front of the car once it had started moving. The fact that he walked in front of the car and then stopped in front of it shows that was deliberate.
Glassnoser
12d ago
- Yes.
- It's quite possible, but I don't know.
- No, I'm not saying that has anything to do with the second officer. I'm saying the shooter planted himself in front of the driver right before she was about to drive off.
Glassnoser
12d ago
Abrahamic religions are more pronatal than Zoroastrianism.
OK, but what good is that if they're apostasizing en masse? It's backfiring. Iran's TFR is 1.7. It's basically a Western country.
If only a small segment of Iran’s society is high TFR, then that segment can double in total population percentage every 20 years. So in 80 years, the 2% of Iranian households that are super Islamic will become 16%. This is obviously beneficial to a state and it’s the same reason Israel nurtures and babies their Haredi population.
Do they actually have 2% of the population with an extremely high fertility rate? If they wanted such a thing, they'd be better off encouraging religious diversity. I don't see how enforcing Islam helps with that.
As another commenter pointed out, I'm not sure you really want a large portion of your population to be Haredim or Mennonites, given that they typically have extremely low productivity.
Glassnoser
15d ago
The word you're looking for is 'foment'.
Glassnoser
15d ago
How effective is it though? Iranians are the least religious people of any Muslim country I have ever met by far. The heavy-handedness of the government in enforcing the religious laws seems to be backfiring. Islam is on the decline, with many people converting to Zoroastrianism.
Glassnoser
15d ago
Why do protests in poorer countries like Iran result in so many deaths? The police seem to enact much cruder and less effective methods at controllling the protests. In West, we seem to be much more capable of keeping large protests under control without too much violence and death.
Is it just that the regime doesn't care as much about the deaths of protesters and thinks a brutal response is more effective at deterring further protesting? Or are they just at crowd control? Sniping people from rooftops seems very ineffective relative to groups of riot police clearing out streets block by block.
Killing people seems to like a poor choice because it undermines the legitimacy of the government. If the protesters are clearly causing more harm than the government, it gives the government the moral high ground. Being overly brutal seems like a recipe for greater backlash and foreign intervention.
Glassnoser
15d ago
How does a social safety net reduce patient violence?
How do you know that?
You don't seem to grok the concept of probabilistic beliefs. Every little thing about the situation informs his beliefs about her intentions. He doesn't have absolute certainty about anything and that lack of certainty doesn't mean that the things about which he is uncertain are irrelevant.
We don't live in a world where cops are killing people who have lost control of their cars for medical reasons and I don't think many people who find that acceptable. The reason is that when the person getting shot is seen as innocent, people instinctively look for alternative solutions to preventing accidents than just killing the driver.
No, he does have to guess about her state of mind. He has to make his decision based on the totality of the evidence, even if it is uncertain. Guessing people's state of mind is a big part of police work. It's a skill he's supposed to have.
You seem to be arguing that a police officer standing in front of a car whose driver is having an involuntary spasm, and consequently driving towards him, is justified in shooting the driver.
More options
Context Copy link