Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
My stance is that we should wait for further information and investigation. What we have so far doesn't look good, but I'm not going to jump to calling them murderers when there's reasonable doubt over things like if the first shot was even commanded.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Federal agents cannot be prosecuted by the state for actions that occur during their duties. They can only be prosecuted at the federal level. He'll be fine, or at least safe from the MN government apparatus.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
It's a shame the Parkland and Uvalde school district law enforcement who were directly responsible for the school were not convicted.
The laws on child endangerment just weren't made for them. For example, in the Parkland case, for the charge to stick they had to argue with a straight face that the deputy was somehow a caretaker of the children, as in he would have been giving them meals and monitoring them to make sure they don't do anything stupid. Obviously, that's not the case, so he was acquitted.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
They can in fact just be wrong about CK and right about RG. But I sincerely doubt that they just happened to arrive at those two different conclusions independently. I think it's highly likely there is a flawed reasoning process behind the two different conclusions, and the flaws of that reasoning process made them wrong on CK.
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.
With him in her path? That means he was about to be seriously injured. In fact, he suffered internal bleeding as a result of the collision.
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.
That is not what I am saying. My point was that her "non-threatening" behavior doesn't matter, when she in fact exhibited behavior that threatened the life and bodily integrity of Jonathan Ross, and was an imminent deadly threat to him.
Conversely, a man can be the most deranged person in the world. He can murder 50 people and shoot off bullets into the neighborhood. He can lead officers on a high-speed chase and crash several innocent bystanders. He can exhibit a motherload of threatening behaviors, is what I'm saying. However, if at the end of the chase he gives up, gets out of his car, puts his hands up and lets the officers cuff him? There is no way that the police are allowed to shoot him. Ever.
You absolutely have to justify it. It's just very easy to justify.
You have to justify that the robber was a deadly threat to you. You don't have to justify that he was trying to kill you, but it doesn't hurt your case to do so. You seem to think intentions (from all parties involved) matter more than they really do.
Someone driving a car in your general direction is not remotely similar in how threatening it is.
"General direction" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. I would use "general direction" to describe being maybe 10 to 20 feet away from a car. I would not use it to describe literally being next to it.
No, the risk of being killed by being hit by the car.
On a purely physical/biological/medical level, maybe. But on a legal/moral level? What I said still applies. He doesn't have to calculate what kind of injury he could be suffering before he can respond to a deadly threat. It doesn't matter if it that means it was less likely that he would die, the level of risk was already too high, because it's a deadly threat.
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.
You said someone walking down the sidewalk might have a bomb hidden underneath his jacket. You need to clarify how much the police know in this situation. It's your hypothetical example after all.
If they don't know anything at all and have no reason to suspect him in particular over any other person walking down the sidewalk, then they aren't allowed to do anything, not even detain him.
If they have a reasonable suspicion that he has a hidden bomb, then per Terry v. Ohio, they are allowed to at least detain him at gunpoint and search him. If he flees rather than letting himself be searched, then Tennessee v. Garner applies.
She does have the right to flee without being shot.
No, she doesn't have the right to flee, period. Now, an officer may or may not have the right to shoot a fleeing suspect, but that's a separate discussion.
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.
On what grounds? And anyway, it's not clear that he even intended to do that.
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.
Self-defense does not operate on continuous probabilities. No self-defender is ever thinking "what is the probability of a deadly threat?" I mean, seriously, have you thought through what would go through a self-defender's mind in a scenario?
Let's say you're a clerk and a guy walks in your store. He's wearing a hoodie, a face mask and sunglasses. Well, it's a bit suspicious, but he's not a deadly threat. Then he walks over to the counter, maybe puts some cigarettes and beer on there. Okay, still not a deadly threat. And now let's say he pulls out a gun and points it at you. Now he is a deadly threat, and you are justified to shoot him.
There is no point where you as the clerk is going to think "he is a deadly threat, but I have to wait because... the probability hasn't risen enough yet?" At each moment, you'll either think "not a deadly threat" or "deadly threat." You may have suspicions from his hoodie and mask, you may even pay more attention to him, but until he pulls out the gun he is not a deadly threat, and you cannot pull out your own gun either.
Put simply, it's bad advice or easily misinterpreted advice to put "waiting" and "deadly threat" in the same sentence (with regards to the legalities).
That's what they're already doing 99.999999% of the time.
Because 99.9% of the time there is no deadly threat that they can see. It wouldn't even register in their mind. When there is a deadly threat, often that's the first time they think about something being a deadly threat. At that point, there's no legal reason to wait, and it's bad advice to talk about being sure that you have legal standing or whatever before acting on a deadly threat.
They absolutely do have a duty to retreat in some situations.
Which ones? Which laws say this?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
No, I don't.
Why not?
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 keep thinking that he would have known more than what a reasonable officer put in his same position would have known. My point was that perhaps watching it multiple times biases you to see certain things as obvious and known when they were not.
Being a police officer is not like playing a video game.
I agree! But if you're saying this, then you don't seem to appreciate my point enough, so let me rephrase. He only gets to go through the situation once, he does not get to do it again. You, however, get to watch it multiple times. You are the one who is playing a video game. And, for that matter, everyone who is discussing this situation (including me). It's why I discount a lot of things in the videos that may seem "obvious" to you, because I can't imagine that I could do any better were I to be placed in the same position and didn't know what was going to happen. If I knew how everything was going to play out, I could definitely handle the situation without using deadly force. But if I had to go through it for the first time and had no idea what she was going to do? I don't think so.
Imagine if all knowledge of this event was erased and you had to watch the video again for the first time. Do you really think that you would have noticed all the things in the video that you argue he should have known? Do you notice these sorts of details in any video you watch for the first time? There's that famous experiment of the gorilla walking by in the background of a video of people playing basketball, and people (focused on counting the number of passes) consistently fail to notice the gorilla. You seem to think that you could notice the gorilla, if you watched the video for the first time without knowing that there was going to be a gorilla. Is that right?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Yes, there is.
Which one?
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.
There are several problems with this argument.
You cannot intentionally kill them. But if they are an imminent deadly threat, you are allowed to shoot them. Once they are no longer an imminent deadly threat, you are not allowed to shoot them anymore. If you shoot them during the window of time in which they are an imminent deadly threat, then any consequences to the bad guy are not really any of your concern. So yes, you can kill them, but you cannot intentionally do it. However, in the moment, whether your bullets will actually kill them is completely unknowable, and also not something you should care about if you are facing an imminent deadly threat. That's why we talk about using force, such as ordinary force or deadly force. We don't talk about killing, and the fact that you are saying "killing" screams to me that you fundamentally misunderstand self-defense law.
Your last sentence, "If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them" also seems to be confusing different levels of force. Yes, if someone is merely an ordinary threat, you cannot use deadly force to stop them. If someone is pepper-spraying you, for example, you are not allowed to shoot them. However, I've established that I'm talking about a deadly force scenario, i.e. a man pointing a gun at you. There is no such law that says that if you can stop him without using deadly force, that you must do so (besides duty-to-retreat states that mandate you must retreat if you can do safely, but it's not clear that can be done here). He is a deadly threat, so you can respond to him using deadly force. It's that simple.
It's a bad example because throwing a coffee mug could help.
Are you saying that a coffee mug is able to stop a guy who's pointing a gun at you?
But my point still stands. If your response to a deadly threat is ineffective or futile, that doesn't mean you lose the claim to self-defense.
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.
He could have, but with a short time frame for him to respond to the threat, it's unreasonable to expect him to pick that option at the drop of a dime. Humans don't think that quick. Are you familiar with the OODA loop? It takes time to observe the threat, orient himself to it, decide his course of action, and then act on it. If he was thinking about multiple options, it takes time to decide between them, but it's highly likely that -- since this happened so quickly -- he wasn't even thinking about moving out of the way. He literally made a split-second decision. This is why I continue to think that you're viewing this situation with 20/20 hindsight. You keep ascribing more ability and knowledge to him than what a reasonable officer put in the same circumstances would have had.
But I don't think you appreciate that the evidence against him is cumulative.
I disagree. The totality of the circumstances points in his favor. You (and others) keep raising many different arguments that are just invalid by themselves. I don't seriously think that he's innocent just because of one refuted argument, I think he's innocent because he did almost everything right and his conduct reflects the elements of lawful self-defense.
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.
I do not think that a self-defender has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario. There are, however, certain assumptions they may make depending on the circumstances. For example, the quintessential example of the robber pointing a gun at you. You are allowed to assume that he is willing to shoot and kill you. You can even assume that his gun is real and that it's loaded. Yes, there have been many cases where a bad guy points a fake gun at someone, gets shot by a good guy, and dies. The good guy is 100% in the clear, because to any reasonable person, a fake gun looks as real of a gun as any.
You can make the argument that assuming the robber has a real and loaded gun and is willing to use it is assuming the absolute worst case scenario, and you would be right, because robbers don't usually use (fake) guns to kill, they usually use it for intimidation. But in this case, it's fine to assume the absolute worst case scenario, and to shoot him in self-defense.
It depends on the circumstances. A vehicle that is completely stationary and not moving throughout the course of an interaction? There is no argument in the world that it could be a deadly threat. A vehicle that is accelerating towards you, though? A completely different story.
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.
No, what counts as lawful self-defense is determined by the totality of the circumstances. Training and standard procedure may factor into it, but it does not determine it alone. Chauvin kneeled on a man's neck for several minutes, when he wasn't a deadly threat, and when it was unnecessary for him to do so to restrain him. That alone would violate the law regardless of what training and standard procedure say, and his situation is completely opposite to a quick, seconds-long encounter where an officer faced an imminent deadly threat and was forced to make a split-second decision to respond to it.
It's not relevant what we know in hindsight. What matters is what he should have known in the situation.
You then list several things that are irrelevant, are things he could not have known, or ascribe greater-than-human ability to him, all of which I (and others) have already gone over with you. Again, I still think you're operating with 20/20 hindsight.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
The fundamental problem is that there's just no law saying a police officer has to protect anyone. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales and Warren v. DC. That's why they've gone with child endangerment charges, which is a huge stretch compared to something more relevant. It's the same tactic they tried with that Parkland deputy who also did nothing during a school shooting, and he got acquitted too.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all. It's already bad enough that in the best case scenario, the police are only minutes away when seconds matter. But the fact that police can and have done nothing at all? I would be interested in seeing their counterargument for why people shouldn't arm themselves and have the ability to be their own first responder.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
To be a devil's advocate (I don't morally agree with Gonzales' acquittal), we have the draft because it matters quite a lot to the continued existence of our country. Some kids dying in mass shootings is tragic, but rare, even when compared to other gun deaths, and it's not a threat to the nation as a whole. An invasion from a foreign power has much more serious consequences.
Now I'm just saying that's the platonic ideal of the draft. Whether in practice the military actually wages wars that are necessary for the survival of the US, that's an entirely different matter.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
If we want to rehash the political free speech moderation argument great, but that's a totally different "digital commons" argument
Actually, the two are more related than you think. A lot of Youtube's censorship decisions come from advertiser pressure. They don't want to see their brand next to a "brand risk", so Youtube decides to ban the content rather than risk losing advertisers.
I don't think arguments about who owns something is a satisfactory way to resolve questions about it being a commons. If you're arguing from a purely legal perspective, cool, but people here are talking from a moral perspective. If the water company in your area suddenly became private and had the legal right to refuse service to anyone, and they started forcing you to use certain sinks of theirs that had advertisements, would you really say that they're not polluting the commons, because it's not the commons, it's their party and you have to play by their rules?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
That a bunch of people decided to hang out on it doesn't mean it becomes public property, some kind of digital squatter's rights, like if enough people hang out on my lawn it becomes a park.
This is an inaccurate analogy. It's like if you had a big lawn that could host a billion people, and you let anyone hang out there for free, and there were certain people who were giving speeches drawing crowds of millions on your lawn, and them moving their speeches elsewhere was just prohibitively expensive for some reason such that basically no one ever did it and we laugh at the ones who tried because they all failed miserably.
I guess I should draw a distinction between private property, the commons, and a monopoly. I think it's clear that Youtube has quite the monopoly on online video distribution. The competition doesn't come even close. With their monopoly, they effectively own the commons as their private property with regards to video. In the absence of competition, how is it fair that one company gets to decide who is and isn't allowed to speak on a hugely influential platform?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
That's a bit of a dodge, don't you think? When everyone uses them, they are practically the commons. Youtube is a good example, having network effects so profound that no one dares even think about hosting their own video distribution website. Even the creators on there are called "Youtubers" which underlines how much they are tied to the platform.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I was about to say this. Seriously, don't threaten me with a good time. Many of the ills wrought by the Internet are because everyone is on it now, especially children. Kids have no reason to be online, and when they are they are easy targets for groomers, and that results in several poorly-thought-out government-led policy initiatives that are a headache for everyone (e.g. the UK "Online Safety Act"). But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I value anonymity enough that I'm not going to give out my credit card information, tying my account to my real life identity, just to remove ads. That information is begging to be leaked in a data breach anyway.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I believe that speakers can choose whichever pronoun they want to use to refer to anyone. You can call this something like pronoun anarchy. I emphasize that they are already able to, not just that they should, because there's really no good way to enforce using preferred pronouns. You can butt in and say "use these pronouns" but there's no way you can actually force someone to say those pronouns.
This applies to the ones who want to affirm trans people too. I'm not saying you can't call Dylan a her. If you want to, go right ahead. You have that liberty, just as I have the liberty to call him a he.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Because it's extremely hard to apply a logically consistent standard to both deaths that results in justifying CK's but not RG's.
Let's try one. How about the self-defense law of the United States? Well, CK's would obviously be unjustified because he was not an imminent threat to anybody. Meanwhile, people are debating the merits of RG's under self-defense so someone could make a plausible argument that hers was unjustified.
Then how about we say the decedent should have made better decisions? Call this the Better Decisions standard. That is, CK's was justified because (some argue) he held inflammatory beliefs about minorities like trans people and/or a belief that the Second Amendment is necessary, and holding such beliefs is a poor decision. Well, that justifies RG's as well since she also made many bad decisions (e.g. deliberately antagonizing ICE) that resulted in her death, so Better Decisions isn't going to work either.
Absent a standard that can apply to both cases this way, what is one to make of someone who mixes standards? Let's say they apply Better Decisions to CK's but self-defense law to RG's (and say that RG's was not justified under self-defense). I could address their arguments about CK's and RG's deaths separately, but I think a more efficient way to address both arguments is to just ask why they don't apply the Better Decisions standard to RG's as well. After all, I think it's best to apply consistent standards everywhere unless you have a very good reason not to, as doing so shows that you are impartial and unbiased. Is there an important difference between them that I'm not aware of?
Of course, besides the fact that CK was red tribe and RG was blue tribe, but in the assumption of good faith we assume that one wouldn't justify CK's death merely for being on Team Red.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
That's a convenient story, but it's not really true. People started owning cars and moving to suburbs well before cities had crime and homelessness problems. (Certainly though cities having those problems doesn't make them appealing places to move to.) The truth is that it's just nice to live in a place where you have lots of space and have a mode of transportation that's quick, convenient, point-to-point and on-demand, and a lot of people have chosen to live that way. If you don't want to, then there are plenty of American cities you can move to where you can get by without a car.
You're right. It was a bad example. The point is that it is possible in principle to use what can be a deadly weapon in a way that isn't a threat of severe bodily harm. Comparison to guns are bad because guns are specifically for killing people. If someone pulls out a gun on a police officer or uses it in any way to attack him, that can reasonably be interpreted as as threat on his life.
A car is nothing like that. 99.99% of the time it is not being used a weapon.
A gun is not being used as a deadly weapon when it is shot at the range.
I can agree that deadly weapons are only deadly weapons when they are deadly. But that circles back to StableOutshoot's original point, which is that the car here is a deadly weapon being used in assault. If the car was stationary, for example, then it's not a deadly weapon. It doesn't matter that 99.99% of the time it wasn't used as a deadly weapon, if we're in the 0.01% scenario where it is in fact a deadly weapon.
If you're arguing that it was a deadly weapon but there was no threat to bodily harm, that just sounds like an incoherent, confused statement. Either it's a deadly weapon or it isn't, and if it is a deadly weapon, then that implies that it is a threat of bodily harm. So either it's both a deadly weapon and a threat of bodily harm, or neither. We don't go around calling everything in the world a deadly weapon just because it could be used as one.
He has the prior that virtually all cars are used for transportation, not killing.
This is the sort of argument that makes sense when considering which traffic policies to implement, not in a life-or-death self-defense scenario. It also just doesn't matter. He has the prior that someone driving at him means he's about to be seriously injured or die.
He has the fact that she was not exhibiting any threatening behaviour towards him.
Doesn't matter. Many non-compliant criminals have become deadly threats to officers despite showing no aggression or threatening behavior.
He has the fact that she was turning the car away from him and that he was clear of the car by the time he shot. He has the fact that he should have been aware that she did not know where he was going to position himself once she had stopped reversing and that the initial direction of her car was intended to facilitate her escape, not to hit him.
No, he doesn't have any of those things. You're only saying those with hindsight and with assuming humans have faster reaction times than they actually do.
The only piece of information that he had to support the idea that she was trying to kill him
No, he doesn't have to think that she was trying to kill him. No officer has ever been required to argue that someone was trying to kill them, though it certainly doesn't hurt their self-defense claim. They just have to argue that someone was an imminent deadly threat. Intentions do not matter here.
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.
It does, because it dramatically reduces the risk.
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.
Someone walking down the sidwalk might have a bomb hidden inside his jacket. That doesn't justify killing him.
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.
By standing in front of the vehicle, and by pulling out his gun.
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.
If there is so much uncertainty about whether that initial movement forward was an attempt on his life, then it's much wiser to wait a moment and confirm that
No, it's not. 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.
You don't have to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight, but you do have to be conservative and only shoot when the threat rises to sufficient level and you do have to wait until the threat is immediate.
This is just bad advice or easily misinterpreted. "Waiting" here implies that you know that there is a deadly threat but... you just can't do anything about it yet? 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. There's no scenario in which the self-defender would think to wait just in case it's not a deadly threat. If a self-defender does wait, it's only for tactical reasons (e.g. waiting for the robber with the gun to turn his head away, so they can draw their own gun before the robber has a chance to realize they've done so).
You also have to take other options to get out of harms way if they are available to you.
Based on what? 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.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.
It says "resisting or preventing" an offense, not just preventing an offense. Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?
I've watched the video many times
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. But it's like, well, have you ever played video games? Have you ever made all the right decisions in the game on the first try? No, you don't. 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).
I think he had lots of time to process the situation
Obviously he had enough time, because he was able to draw his gun and use it. If she had an instant kill-death laser controlled by her brain, or something, even the fastest draw in the West wouldn't be able to stop her. But no, I don't think that's what you mean. I think you're saying that he had lots of time to process the situation and choose a decision that didn't involve shooting her (or shooting her less), which I think is flat-out incorrect.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
The argument is that if it isn't reasonable even to think it might have stopped the threat, then his self-defence claim falls apart.
Again, there is no law that says that it must be reasonable to think that your response would have stopped 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.
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? That doesn't make sense to me.
it was reasonable for him to put himself in front of a moving car
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. And we do not judge use of force with hindsight, ever. It is extraordinarily difficult to predict, in the moment, which path a vehicle is going to take. I can agree that (just to give an extreme example) if a car is normally driving down the street in a straight line, it would be dumb for an officer to jump out in front of it and expect the driver to stop. But that's not what happened here. The car was stationary, then moved backwards and that's when the officer walked in front of it. Is that a bad tactical decision? Probably. 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. In general, drivers who are non-compliant are very unpredictable and can easily maneuver their vehicles in whichever direction they want. If you view things with hindsight, you can always make an argument that the officers could have avoided "putting themselves in harm's way".
Interesting to see how the level of outrage Trump gets for capturing Maduro is orders of magnitude more than the outrage levied at Obama for extrajudicial killings.
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