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Notes -
A woman in Minneapolis has been killed in an altercation with ICE. I don’t really trust any of the narratives being spun up. Here are
twothree angles:Angle 1
Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]
Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)
This is actually a fairly discussed type of shooting. Law enforcement confronts a person in a vehicle, the LEO positions himself in front of the vehicle, the person in the vehicle drives forward, and the cop shoots the person. Generally, courts have found that this is a legitimate shoot. The idea being that a car can be as deadly a weapon as anything.
Those who are less inclined to give deference to law enforcement argue that fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence, and that usually in these situations the LEO has put himself in front of the vehicle.
I have a long history of discussing shooters in self-defense situations [1] [2] [3] and also one of being anti-LEO. However, I’m softer on the anti-LEO front in the sense that within the paradigm in which we exist, most people think the state should enforce laws, and that the state enforcing laws = violence.
The slippery slope for me: “Fleeing police shouldn’t be a death sentence”
“Resisting arrest shouldn’t be a death sentence”
“If you just resist hard enough, you should be able to get away with it”
People really try to divorce the violence from state action, but the state doesn’t exist without it.
Part of the bargain we make with the state is that the violence is structured, measured, constrained, fair, etc. right?
To play with the argument a bit, standing in front of the car feels like the officer is responsible for escalating the situation since now there’s a deadly weapon in play.
Presumably he stands in front of the car to make it less likely she’ll drive away, but the stakes are now higher than they probably needed to be, right?
Like imagine a police officer talking to someone ten feet away and throwing a knife on the ground in between them. The person then takes a step forward towards the officer and oh my god he’s going for the knife!
Edit: having actually watched the videos now I’m much more sympathetic to standing in front of the car—it seems like he’s walking over to the driver side to potentially help when the driver exits.
Which means you shouldn't be roughed up for shits and giggles, not that the cops should let you run away or attack them.
No, why?
Because if he’s not in front of the car, her driving forward doesn’t put his life in danger?
He’s escalated it by making escape a threat to his life when it didn’t need to be.
There is no "right to escape from cops", and if she doesn't escape, she won't be putting anyone's life in danger, so she's the one escalating.
I think you’re conflating “made a bad choice” with “escalating.” She didn’t make the options life or death, though she evidently chose the latter (from watching it it’s not clear there was any intent to harm him).
He helped set the terms. I’m not saying it’s all on him but I’d be pretty surprised if he doesn’t regret stepping in front of that car.
The officer didn't. Just standing in front of a stopped car is not a life and death situation, even civillians are allowed to do it, and any driver charging at one, would be found guilty of some sort of a crime. She's the one who made it a lot closer to life and death, which is why she was the one escalating.
You’re right and I’ve revised my view after watching the videos. Somehow what I was picturing from description alone was pretty different.
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But there is often a limit to the ability to claim self-defense when you deliberately engineered a situation for the purpose of being forced to resort to self-defense. Standing in front of a suspect's vehicle seems to fit the bill just fine. You are not physically impeding them from driving away.
If you give legal privileges to a conduct, you will see more of it. Standing in front of the car of a suspect to prevent them from escaping is reckless and will often lead to someone getting harmed. So it is logical to set the incentives so that cops will employ safer conduct instead.
I understand this point of view but this seems to amount to “Just let people flee.” If a cop were trying to arrest someone located in a room, it would seem logical to stand in the doorway blocking exit even though this would mean a charge towards the doorway becomes the same as a charge towards the cop. The alternative seems absurd, that cops are obligated to never corner a suspect and always leave an easy and unobstructed path of escape. In my example, is a cop obligated to politely stand aside from the door so as to not escalate? That seems absurd.
The difference between a guy standing in the door and a guy standing in front of a car is that the guy in the door has a good chance of physically stopping a suspect.
Without going all principle of a double effect on you, it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between an action which does something beneficial (physically reducing the risk of a suspect escaping) alongside with something undesirable (increasing the risk of a physical confrontation) and an action which mostly does something undesirable (turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon, which can then be answered in kind).
Some Culture Warrior has dug out rules for the CBP:
Now, I will grant you that ICE is a sister agency of CBP, so these rules do not apply to them. If they did apply, I think that the case would be rather clear cut: a fuckwit deliberately engineered a situation in which he could use deadly force while claiming self-defense when agency policy told him explicitly not to do that. Not so different from a cop who decides to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin on patrol so he is justified in shooting any teen who assaults him.
The agent did not do this. The agent was there before the car started moving.
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The difference between a guy standing in the door and a guy standing in front of a car is that the guy in the door has a good chance of physically stopping a suspect.
Without going all principle of a double effect on you, it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between an action which does something beneficial (physically reducing the risk of a suspect escaping) alongside with something undesirable (increasing the risk of a physical confrontation) and an action which mostly does something undesirable (turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon, which can then be answered in kind).
Some Culture Warrior has dug out rules for the CBP:
Now, I will grant you that ICE is a sister agency of CBP, so these rules do not apply to them. If they did apply, I think that the case would be rather clear cut: a fuckwit deliberately engineered a situation in which he could use deadly force while claiming self-defense when agency policy told him explicitly not to do that. Not so different from a cop who decides to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin on patrol so he is justified in shooting any teen who assaults him.
/images/17678734169278667.webp
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Why not though? They have the cars license plate and can make an arrest later.
What happens when later comes and the person still would rather threaten harm to themselves or others instead of being arrested?
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Suppose you are parked next to me at the grocery store, and I am standing behind your car while I hold the cart for another person who is unloading it into the trunk. After 10 seconds of this, you become impatient and attempt to run me over with your car, and I pull out my gun and shoot you. Have I "deliberately engineered a situation for the purpose of being forced to result to self-defense?" My intuition is, no, I'm doing something that is possibly annoying, possibly grounds for being physically moved out of the way, but in no way inviting attempted vehicular homicide.
Now, you might counter that the situation with the police is different, because it starts as a hostile interaction, and the police should intuit that someone might be more likely to take that action in their case. However, this runs directly into the moral hazard that you are now legally privileging the judgment of someone who is at a minimum hostile, probably a lawbreaker and antisocial, over the conduct of someone who might be having a moment of road rage. This might make sense to people are see murderous hostility to the police as the default normal condition that requires no justification, but that's not an intuition that I share.
If you stand in front of a car with the intent of blocking them in, and then shoot the driver when he tries to pull out anyway, that's almost always murder.
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That situation is different, because if you stand in the way of a car while unloading groceries, your intend is clearly not to force the driver to either stay put or escalate to deadly force. Also, it is very rare for bananas to trigger a flight response, while being faced with police arrest will trigger such a response in a small fraction of the population (and possibly a larger faction of the part of the population likely to be arrested) where suspects will risk their lives trying to escape even if they are not currently wanted for a capital crime. It is stupid, but people are predictably stupid in that way.
I would argue that intent matters. Consider the opposite situation. A police vehicle tries to pursue a suspect, but it hampered (1) by an innocent bystander crossing the road who does not realize what is going on or (2) by an activist who is placing themselves in harms way to coerce the cops to stop the pursuit. While I would want the police to try to avoid killing the person in their way in either case, I would cut them a lot more slack for grazing the activist. Placing yourself (and others) in mortal danger to coerce a behavior from others seems straightforward bad. If the coercion was also unlawful (e.g. the activist doing the blocking), I won't cry to much if they break their leg in the process.
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I mean, presumably ICE is detaining or arresting her because she's in the way and being annoying; if she's driving away (again, presumably because she decided it was no longer worth it), this removes the annoyance and the obstruction, so it seems extra odd to make it into a life or death situation when essentially the situation is about to resolve itself to almost everyone's satisfaction shortly.
This also doesn't fit your example. Standing behind your car has a clear and temporary purpose: holding the cart for someone. It's not for the purpose of obstructing the car, the car is just inconvenienced as a side effect. A better example would be the escalation into a bar fight. At some point, one person gets super close into the face of someone else. Human nature is to push the person away and out of their 'personal space'. The shove is interpreted as violence, and a punch is (or worse) is thrown. The fight starts. Any number of variants are possible. Now, responsibility for this series of events is rarely clear-cut. I would say that sticking your face a few inches away from someone else's is basically asking to get pushed away, even if the shove is the first physical thing to happen and technically bad to do. This is not a perfect analogy by any means, but the point is that it's usually understood that deliberately constraining the options of someone else brings on some responsibility to go with it. Law enforcement, presumably being trained for situations as it is literally a big part of their job, is not perfectly immune from blame simply due to their law enforcement role, and in fact it might be reasonable to expect higher standards.
Now sure, you can say that once law enforcement pulls the trigger on something, they are justified in following through, but surely not all crimes are worth equal effort in enforcing? Cops and prosecutors themselves don't even believe that as a matter of regular, daily work. There's a sliding scale of seriousness for crimes, and this one kind of seems like it's near the bottom. I'm sympathetic to arguments about avoiding accidentally incentivizing criminals to regularly escape, but obstruction seems like the worst possible crime for that worry to apply, right?
I think this is where I disagree. The officer standing behind the car is also not for the purpose of obstructing the car, it's for the purpose of effecting the arrest of the person inside the car. This is not like a bar fight at all. Arresting people engaging in obstruction of legitimate police activity is something I want more of, not less of. It seems entirely correct that the police are deliberately constraining the options of someone they are trying to arrest. That's what arrest is.
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If you're standing in the way of their car and they attempt to drive out of the parking spot as if you're not there, my intuition is you just walk out of the way. Not pull a gun and shoot. In fact moving out of the way appears to be vastly easier in terms of getting rid of the immediate danger.
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I made no mention of a right to escape. I’m just observing that it’s silly to unnecessarily make an escape attempt put your life at risk then hide behind fear for your life when an easy to anticipate behavior occurs.
I think it was dumb to run don’t get me wrong but I don’t see why we should accept “fear for my life” as some kind of blanket excuse.
The police officer changed the outcomes from { arrest, gets away } to { arrest, someone dies }
I agree she chose badly but I still think it was stupid to turn this into a situation where someone might die.
If he weren’t in front of the car and she’d fled would you endorse him shooting at the car to stop her?
I'm saying the only way your argument makes sense is if there was such a right.
By that logic arresting any armed suspect would be "silly" because you'd be putting yourself in the same situation when someone has a gun, and you want detain them.
You’re right and I’ve revised my view after watching the videos. Somehow what I was picturing from description alone was pretty different.
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Isn't the wisdom of this contingent on the probabilities?
Suppose we go from {arrest (50%), gets away (50%)} to {arrest (98%), someone dies (2%)}? Are you still confident this is "stupid?"
That said, I don't know what the actual matrix looks like, and it's plausible that the juice is not worth the squeeze, but I don't think you can evaluate whether a particular outcome change is stupid or not without at least considering it. From a game-theory point of view, it can completely change what game is being played.
You’re right the point that out—I’m being brief because I’m on my phone but my full complaint was it seems a bit chickenshit to make the game life or death and then appeal to fearing for your life. If you didn’t want your life at risk don’t step in front of the car.
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I think framing it purely as 'X right exists [and trumps everything]' and leaving it at that is not a helpful framing, because especially when talking about law enforcement various "rights" come into conflict with each other all the time.
If a right like that existing wouldn't make the argument clear cut, doesn't make that my case, which depends on such a right not existing, even stronger?
...people pretty obviously have a right to not be shot by police unless they've in some sense 'deserved it' or some other interest is served to ameliorate a certain rate of accidents. A "right to life" ring a bell? Tradeoffs exist when it comes to public policy. I much dislike the constant agitation by people all over politics at pretending these tradeoffs don't even exist in the first place because of XYZ iron law or moral stance. In this case, it feels completely beside the point to view police actions as inherently self-justifying. And to be clear, I'm advocating for policy change, not necessarily a specific outcome in this specific case.
You're the one that said "I think framing it purely as 'X right exists [and trumps everything]' and leaving it at that is not a helpful framing, because especially when talking about law enforcement various "rights" come into conflict with each other all the time", so right off thr bat you've originally argued against your case, which was my point.
My case rests on a specific right (one to escape), NOT existing. If the suspect does not escape, by means of charging at an officer with a deadly weapon, at no point is their life in danger, so framing the discussion as a "right to life" id completely absurd.
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Yes- as a political slogan of the pro-life movement, relating to the inherent innocence of unborn who have made no decisions that could warrant killing them.
Secondarily, as a bad-faith attempt to twist that broadly understood meaning into other non-analogous contexts, typically as a poor 'gotcha' intended to imply hypocrisy.
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