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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.
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this issue, but to push back on the idea of it being a slippery slope, I think we can steelman the "fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence" idea to something like "the police should not deliberately block off only nonviolent methods of fleeing in order to force an equivalence between fleeing and violence.
Imagine a dystopia in which police have a secret goal of wanting to shoot as many people as possible, but are legally prohibited from this because their laws are almost equivalent to ours: you can only shoot someone in self defense (or defense of another), but have some extra loopholes that allow the following scenario. The police always travel in pairs, and instead of normal handcuffs they carry one cuff with a long thin wire dangling off them. When a police officer cuffs someone it doesn't directly restrain them in any way, but the police officer ties the wire around their own neck. This means if the suspect attempts to run and gets far enough away, the wire tightens and slices/strangles the officer. The other officer can then legally shoot the suspect in order to save their partner's life. That is, the officer is deliberately endangering themselves in a conditional way in order to create opportunities to shoot people.
The steelmanned argument would then place "standing in front of a driven vehicle" in this same scenario. You are not physically restraining a person. You are not actually preventing them from escaping. Instead, you are creating a scenario in which you deliberately endanger yourself conditional on them fleeing as an excuse to shoot them. This is roughly equivalent to just training a gun on them and saying "don't run or I'll shoot you", which police officers are generally not allowed to do. This is a loophole in which they are allowed to do it. Saying "we should close this loophole, you can't just put yourself in danger for the express purpose of giving yourselves opportunities to shoot people" does not slip into "violence is allowed" because it's categorically and consistently anti danger/violence. It's not necessarily about deliberately giving people opportunities to flee, or even failing to close off opportunities to flee if you can actually do that, but it's a claim that abusing your legal power and using yourself as a hostage is not a legitimate means to close off escape.
Of course, I expect a large fraction of people do believe weaker versions of this and just hate police. But I think there is some legitimate point here in the stronger version.
You say this as if this is not already the case in our current reality. How exactly do you think that police use of force laws work? Because I guarantee you it's not the free for all that anti-police activists like to think it is.
Nobody has a legal or moral right to flee from the police, nonviolently or otherwise! Preventing criminals from fleeing the police is a good thing! They shouldn't do that! Why do you seemingly care so much about making sure that criminals have a fair shot at beating an arrest?
The "almost" equivalent is the part where the neck garotte would probably be illegal in our world, but is legal in this hypothetical.
I'm not saying people actually have a right to flee. They're still breaking the law. I'm saying their fleeing is not equivalent to violence and deliberately booby trapping their flight path to be deadly is wrong. Ie, imagine the police officers were going to bust into a drug house but, before entering, they stick landmines at all of the doors and windows so anyone fleeing gets blown up. Yeah, the drug dealers should get arrested and don't deserve to escape. But if they try to flee they shouldn't die for it. I'm pro-death penalty for especially horrific acts of villainy. I'm pro police officers killing people if forced into a dilemma where it's their life vs the life of a criminal threatening them. I'm not pro killing literally any criminal for literally any crime. Consequences should be proportional. Fleeing is not proportional to death. Police officers endangering themselves in order to create an artificial escalation so that fleeing is proportional to death is not the fleeing criminal's fault, but the police's, so does not change the moral calculus here.
The police officer standing in front of a car is only endangered to the precise extent that the criminal is willing to use force against them to escape. This is also true if i.e. an officer is grappling with a suspect, the officer is endangered to the precise extent that the criminal is willing and able to use force to escape from the grapple, but I don't think you would argue against officers grappling with suspects to restrain them... So why is it a problem for an officer to just... stand somewhere?
The difference is that an officer physically grappling them physically restrains them. The officer has a plausible means of preventing the escape beyond their gun. If the officer did not have a gun, or was not allowed to use their gun, a physical grapple is still a useful and legitimate means of restraining a suspect. A normal, non-police officer attempting to do a citizen's arrest might plausibly physically restrain someone this way because it literally restrains them.
In the car case, the officer does not have any means of preventing escape other than their gun. Their body is not going to stop the car, they don't expect their body to stop the car. They do not intend to physically restrain the car, and they very dearly hope they don't have to try. If they did not have a gun or were not allowed to use it they wouldn't stand there in the first place because they're not stupid and they don't want to die. The only reason to stand in front of a car is to threaten the suspect with a gun. It is not a restraint it is a threat.
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But they do this all the time, when cars aren't involved. If they're raiding a building they'll have police blocking all the exits.
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We need to talk about entrapment. Why is entrapment illegal? Simply put, it's because justice usually requires that we judge people on actions they take in and of themselves. NAL, but Wikipedia cites the following from Sorrells v. United States as a definition:
It's worth noting that entrapment's definition and how it bears on the legal system varies substantially state by state (is it a complete or partial defense against liability? what's the standard of proof? etc) but the concept seems pretty fair, and that goes equally for both general moral fairness viewpoints and practicality-based ones.
IF an officer deliberately steps in front of and blocks a vehicle, especially an already moving one, I view it as legal as well as moral entrapment (with the caveat for of course violent offenders who if they escape might hurt badly or kill someone, that sort of thing which already exists as a caveat in similar situations). I'd welcome laws that make this point more explicit, and feel like they might be needed (thus making it more clear that choosing to stand in front of a car is a choice with legal consequences to be aware of, not just something happening semi-naturally). While the officer isn't exactly participating in a new crime, they do enable it pretty straightforwardly. The car is always in some sense a deadly weapon, but it isn't treated as one until the officer, by their position, converts it into one (and on a hair-trigger too). I'm not completely sure it fits neatly within the definition above, but the spirit of the idea seems applicable? Especially if we're now allowing split-second evaluations with no take-backs, it seems wise and fair to prohibit police from standing immediately in front of vehicles as a course of deliberate habit.
As far as I'm aware, entrapment has a much more narrow scope that I think you believe it does. Entrapment is meant to encompass actions where the police convince someone to do a crime when they would otherwise not. For example:
Presenting an opportunity to do a crime is definitely not entrapment; otherwise, hitting someone crossing the street would not be a crime (as they presented you with the opportunity to commit vehicular assault).
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I don't understand why this logic wouldn't apply to any interaction between police and civilians. E.g., you can't participate in resisting arrest if you're not being arrested, therefore police should not arrest people. You can't participate in obstruction of justice if you aren't asked to provide your license and registration, so we shouldn't allow officers to require that either. This is the path of sovereign citizen madness.
We do, however, require that police don't randomly go arresting people. We do, however, require that police have better reasons for asking for license and registration than just randomly coming across someone in the street. The law regulates, and public order and fairness demand, that police pursue their trade with at least some degree of narrowness to avoid excessively harming or inconveniencing otherwise law-abiding people. This is a tradeoff, and one that should swing more decisively on behalf of the average citizen and their right to life in these circumstances. I thought this was somewhat self-explanatory. Obviously I'm not saying that police can never enforce anything for fear of bad things happening.
What makes this type of scenario more urgent to address is how swiftly the pendulum swings. The very fact that some people are radically changing their views based on a difficult-to-judge assessment of 1-2 feet in one direction or the other is a warning sign that this situation might need better guardrails. We obviously cannot prevent all difficult borderline scenarios, but to me it seems that fairness and justice is not being best served by current laws and policies.
I recognize that some people on here take the view that if a cop arrests you, you must comply. I whole-heartedly agree! Some people then go one to say that it follows that somehow it doesn't matter if or in what manner or how often cops arrest people. I very strongly disagree. Conservatism and its emphasis on individual choices does not necessarily mandate that "systemic" issues be ignored as context in all cases. Clearly some liberals believe that severe systemic issues mandate ignoring individual choices, and I equally despise that viewpoint. Reasonable people may disagree on the balance and weighting of factors, but to claim that no balance exists at all is madness no matter which direction you are on. That's especially true with the issues of policing!
So yeah, in this case, no backsliding into sovcit stuff implied. I'm just saying that there's a minimal gain from an officer standing in front of cars as a matter of course compared to the potential for escalatory behavior, that feels similar to entrapment.
(edited for additional clarity adding a paragraph before seeing reply, sorry, bad habit)
Sure, and I suppose I would be fine with a policy that officers may not randomly stand in front of vehicles and play chicken with them. But contingent on there being a lawful vehicle stop, I don't follow the logic that it is entrapment to raise the severity of fleeing the stop unlawfully.
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I do think there's a difference between a cop stepping in front of an already moving vehicle (this should be banned by departmental policy for officer safety if for no other reason) and a vehicle moving into a cop.
And conveniently as a general rule you can replace "cop" with "person" and the result and rules are the same.
In this case the vehicle was "in motion" more generally (reversing first) and so I feel like more latitude is wise to extend.
Generally in life I've observed that cars have a pretty strong "bubble effect" when you're driving, where psychologically you feel separated from the world. Ever tried even something simple like staring at someone through the window? They get abnormally bothered, because mentally they aren't fully "in public" in that moment until the wall is broken. Until then you feel somewhat inviolate. Assessing the situation ought to take that at least partially into account. I mean, look how resistant people are even in normal, fully and obviously justified, clearly signaled stops to getting out of the car!
In some sense it feels wrong to take that into account because it's at least somewhat psychological, but that doesn't really make it less real an effect.
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Good morning, how can I assist the police today instead of running is not hard. You have a lot of rights when it comes to police, fleeing doesn't seem to be one of them.
I'm not saying people actually have a right to flee. They're still breaking the law. I'm saying their fleeing is not equivalent to violence and deliberately booby trapping their flight path to be deadly is wrong. Ie, imagine the police officers were going to bust into a drug house but, before entering, they stick landmines at all of the doors and windows so anyone fleeing gets blown up. Yeah, the drug dealers should get arrested and don't deserve to escape. But if they try to flee they shouldn't die for it. I'm pro-death penalty for especially horrific acts of villainy. I'm pro police officers killing people if forced into a dilemma where it's their life vs the life of a criminal threatening them. I'm not pro killing literally any criminal for literally any crime. Consequences should be proportional. Fleeing is not proportional to death. Police officers endangering themselves in order to create an artificial escalation so that fleeing is proportional to death is not the fleeing criminal's fault, but the police's, so does not change the moral calculus here.
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Uh... sure, if the officer had the perfect opportunity to restrain a suspect, but instead chose to arm them with a deadly weapon, the use of which completely depends on the officer willingly exposing himself to it through a series of convoluted steps, I'd say any pretense of feeling threatened is illegitimate.
I fail to see how this is a useful analogy for a case where the suspect is already in possession of a deadly weapon, prior to restraint.
It's the far extreme on a spectrum of "deliberately put oneself in harms way that the suspect did not themselves intend to put you under". If you barge into a restaurant kitchen and the chef is holding a knife and you dive underneath him, he is not threatening you with the knife. You threatened yourself. Millions of people drive cars. Technically they are deadly weapons but they aren't generally going around threatening people with them. If you jump in front of a moving car then the driver is not threatening you, you are threatening yourself with it.
If you jump in front of an unmoving car then there's some ambiguity there. But if your goal of moving in front of it is with the purpose of threatening yourself with it (the police don't expect their body to stop the car, they expect their guns to stop the car) then something fishy is going on. From the misbehaving police officers perspective, the car's status as a weapon is a feature, and the policeman's vulnerability is being leveraged this way. If the police had magical invincibility powers that made them unharmed by getting hit by cars the strategy would no longer work. We want to incentivize police officers to keep themselves more safe, not incentivize them to endanger themselves to exploit laws intended to protect them. Clearly something has gone wrong when that has become the case.
That would be a great argument, if she was just driving her car, minding her own business, they jumped out in front of her, and shot her. When the car is stopped, and she's surrounded by cops trying to detain her, the correct analogy is the police busting into a kitchen because the Chef is a suspect, and him charging at the only exit, which is blocked by an armed police officer, while holding a knife.
There are a number of differences. First, the car is both the weapon and the means of transportation. The chef could easily drop the knife and then charge the police officer which, while they definitely should not do, would not be deadly force and not deserve death, even if it does deserve harsh punishment.
Second, the police officer has a legitimate means of stopping the chef by physically blocking the door. Because people can stop people, but people cannot stop vehicles. The police officer fully expects that if the chef comes at him he can physically restrain him. The police in front of a car does not intend this. The officer does not have any means of preventing escape other than their gun. Their body is not going to stop the car, they don't expect their body to stop the car. They do not intend to physically restrain the car, and they very dearly hope they don't have to try. If they did not have a gun or were not allowed to use it they wouldn't stand there in the first place because they're not stupid and they don't want to die. The only reason to stand in front of a car is to threaten the suspect with a gun. It is not a restraint it is a threat.
The car being the means of transportation is irrelevant. Like I said in the other post, there is no right to escape from cops, so she's not entitled to use the most efficient means of escape possible. From there it follows she could just get out of the car and make a run for it, the same way the chef could drop the knife. So choosing to escape by means of driving at an agent is roughly equivalent to charging at them with a knife
This is a completely dishonest framing. Nothing short of an execution-style shooting implies that a death is "deserved".
I can agree that detaining a suspect by standing in front of a car might be a bad idea, but I don't see how it nullifies the suspect's free will, or the agent's right to self-defense.
I'm not going maximally extreme and saying it "nullifies the agent's right to self defense". But I'm pointing out that they seem to be deliberately exploiting the right to self defense by putting themselves in danger in order to be allowed to defend themselves. There's circular shenanigans going on here where they make themselves less safe, going against the spirit of the law (which is intended to protect them) in order to trigger the letter of the law and get what they want (the right to shoot the criminal if they try to flee, which the law ordinarily does not give). The agent violates their own rights in part in order to then recover them in a manner with useful side benefits. I'm not saying the law should say "if an agent stands in front of a car oops I guess they have to let themselves die now". But clearly something has gone wrong if the law intended to make them more safe is encouraging them to make themselves less safe.
That seems like assuming the conclusion to me. It was a chaotic situation, and I doubt Agent Chud was scheming to manipulate people into suicide-by-cop. If you want to make that argument, you'll have to point what, specifically, implies this was all deliberate.
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I think grouping cars, which most Americans have, in with deadly weapons for this purpose, while technically correct, is a good example of the non-central fallacy. "In order to make a living in this country, you need [thing]. If you have [thing], then police are entitled to kill you if you try to escape arrest" is rather Catch-22-adjacent.
The most dangerous thing the average person does in any day in America is get on the road and trust other people to do a good job driving. Adding an additional element of some miscreant going 90 MPH in a 30 and blowing multiple lights/stop signs so they can avoid a petty traffic, misdemeanor, or warrant is not something I would encourage the legal system to incentivize.
And also, when did this trend of people just basically saying civil disobedience = no consequences thing happen? You can protest the law peacefully and boringly with a sign and a lame chant. Going out and stopping cops from arresting rapists because you think rape is good doesnt mean you get a free pass just because you cast a frame. In civil disobedience you serve your time, then convince the public and win a later victory as part of the sacrifice of substantial portions of your life.
Otherwise, everyone could claim to do this and face nothing. Maybe Timmy McVeigh's complaints about the Feds were legit. Why dont we just let him out on his own recognizance for a few decades and then arrest him when he is 99 and we have, as a society, finally determined his cause was bunk.
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This is pretty silly. The thing that makes a deadly weapon a deadly weapon is "will it kill you if used against you". In the case of cars, they aren't considered deadly weapons until they are being used in a potentially deadly manner, which makes perfect sense. ArjinFerman could have better phrased it as "already in use of a deadly weapon", but the fundamental fact remains: her car could have killed the guy had this gone slightly differently.
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What do you make of knives? They're pretty uncontroversially deadly weapons, also have non violent uses and I would guess more Americans have at least one than cars.
I think the differenciator for deadly weapon shouldn't be whether there is a non violent use for it, but more what the likely intent is if someone attacks you with that object. If someone attacks you with a knife, or a car, you can surmise the intent is deadly, or at least the attacker has little regard whether his attack will cause death. Unlike a taser, or some blunt weapons (like a baton; a hammer I would probably consider lethal).
If a cop walks up to you as you are holding a knife for whatever reason, grabs your hand and yanks it to have the knife at his own throat, I also do not think that this should generate a right for the cop to then kill you in self-defence if you try to pull the hand away (in a way that might slice the cop's throat in the process). Actually this seems like another good example for my viewpoint.
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Example legal wording from a cursory search:
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Setting aside the question of the appropriate response to a fleeing suspect, this (and a lot of comments here) seem to be glossing the fact that fleeing the cops in a motor vehicle is a choice, just as much as fleeing the cops with a gun is. You can always attempt to flee on foot if you decide to flee.
Responding to you and @ArjinFerman simultaneously, the premise here is that more than one choice has been made: yes, the person the cops were trying to arrest chose to try to flee with a motor vehicle (resp. with the wire/handcuffs), but the cops previously chose to position themselves in the way of the car such that fleeing would entail driving the car at them, resp. chose to attach the wire. One can take the contrived example further - what if the cop holds a gun to their own head and says, "I will kill myself if you escape"? What if they do this using some scifi commitment device that forces them to follow through on this promise? (Is creating exploding collars for that and marketing them to police the next big startup idea?) What if the cop's on a PIP and will get fired if he makes another mistake and is known to be depressed, so the person who is getting arrested knows that the cop will likely kill himself if he gets away?
Like I said, this is not a valid analogy. The reason they'd be wrong in the "attaching the wire" scenario is because they had the chance to restrain the suspect and chose to forgo it in favor of putting themselves in danger, not because they put themselves in harm's way in an attempt to restrain them. The latter is a completely normal part of police work. If it was somehow wrong, the police wouldn't be allowed to attempt to restrain any armed suspect.
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Those contrivances all rely on the police being able (or willing) to do something that is extraordinary. Standing in front of a stopped vehicle is not extraordinary. It is something that an ordinary non-police person is allowed to do, for brief periods of time. It seems unremarkable that what an ordinary person is legally entitled to do, police should be legally entitled to do as well. Whether it is a good idea? Highly contingent, which is why I think broad policies either prescribing or proscribing are unwise.
Surely intent matters. Standing in front of a vehicle with evident intent to stop it from driving away, or even with intent to do a thing that you expect would make the driver want to drive away (think those people non-consensually starting to clean your windshield at traffic lights, or panhandling), I think, should be treated differently from just finding yourself there for unrelated reasons. I do not think a windshield hobo with a weapons license in that situation should get to shoot the driver in self-defense if the driver starts driving, either.
Intent does matter, which is why it matters whether it's someone who has the legal right to keep me there versus someone who does not. If two large men with guns come to my (home) door and ask to "have a chat," I'd be justified in stabbing them to escape if they're randos, but not if they're cops.
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Supposing instead of any of these Rube Goldberg machines the person fleeing just decides to point a gun at the police and tell them he will shoot if they get any closer. Shouldn't the cops back off?
That's presumably different, because in your setup the police did not set things up in such a way that you physically need to point a gun at them to attempt to escape [do something that is not normally taken to be punishable by death].
All right, supposing the police have someone cornered and his only plausible way out is to point the gun (he doesn't know movie karate that would allow him to defeat half a dozen cops unarmed). How is this different from the police having someone cornered and their only way out is to point a vehicle at a police officer? Shouldn't the duty to retreat be roughly analogous in both situations?
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The "non-central fallacy" is a pretty dubious construct to start with, but in any case: no it's not. You can apply the same reasoning to the convoluted contraption from his scenario: handcuffs are not a deadly weapon, and neither is a wire, but they become one when the wire is wrapped around your neck. A car, by itself, is not a deadly weapon, but a car driving at someone is. There's a reason why they became so popular with Muslim terrorists.
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Where did you get that idea? That's what arresting someone is.
Are you making a legal point or a philosophical one? Police are not allowed to shoot at a fleeing suspect. (Barring extreme circumstances, I assume.)
Not that extreme. The precedent is Tennessee vs Garner. Prior to that police could use deadly force against any fleeing felon. The decision made it such that the officer must have probable cause that the fleeing individual poses a significant risk of seriously injuring or killing others.
If a person has shot at someone then they can be shot while fleeing.
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An officer can put himself in the only exit and if you make any movement towards the exit just shoot you.
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