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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.
I had to have a bit of a think about this. Cops standing in front of vehicles as a means to prevent escape then escalating to deadly force has also felt a little off to me but I was not totally clear on why. I think what icks me about it is that, as a tactic, it manufactures a justification to escalate to deadly force to prevent an escape where one would not otherwise be present.
Consider a few cases.
Imagine if the individual in the video was not in a car but rather on foot or on a bicycle. As agents approach to effect an arrest they flee. Would the police have had a legal justification to shoot them to prevent them from fleeing? My impression is no, they would not.
Imagine the individual is in a car, but they effect their escape while police are still several feet away, to the sides or rear of the vehicle. Would the police have had a legal justification to shoot them to prevent them from fleeing? My impression again is no, they would not.
But once you place an office in the direction of the vehicle's escape that escape becomes assault with a deadly weapon, which does permit escalation to lethal force.
It's obvious why officers like it as a tactic. Most people are probably not willing to make contact with a person with their vehicle to flee a crime, so it effectively prevents the obvious way someone might escape. If they are wrong about that individual's willingness it lets them escalate to shooting.
I continue to have mixed feelings about it. I don't like it as a means of manufacturing an excuse to use deadly force where you wouldn't normally be able to but it is not clear to me what reform of it as a tactic would look like.
As to this particular case I think it is unlikely the office gets convicted of a crime. I don't recall particular cases but I'm reasonably confident I've seen cases where officers used deadly force when under less threat and get acquitted. The high profile nature of the case may alter that, though.
ETA:
Someone in the comments on one of the videos posted this slowed down version and now I am less sure. It looks to me like the agent in front of the vehicle (who did the shooting) might be clear of the front of the vehicle before they open fire. High potential to be another McGlockton where what happened in a second or two of time is determinative.
ETA 2:
Slowing down Angle 3 to 1/4 speed and watching from seconds 2-4 it seems clearer to me the agent was out of danger before they opened fire.
ETA 3:
I guess I'm closer to 100% probability that this guy doesn't get convicted. Not because I think it's a good shoot but because someone pointed out that, as a federal officer, state likely can't prosecute and very unlikely the federal government prosecutes. Pending a change in administration I think it's very unlikely there are legal consequences for this guy.
This logic strikes me as dubious. Are cops (or ICE agents) really so dedicated that they're eager to put their lives on the line -- and the danger of standing in front of a car that might abruptly accelerate is very real -- for marginally better clearance rates? Isn't the standard leftist line that cops are so quick to escalate to lethal force because they're cowards unwilling to accept the risks associated with de-escalation? I'm not sure that's true, but it's at least not obviously contrary to their individual interests.
(I could envision a version of this scheme -- leaving out an unloaded gun in easy reach of a suspect, maybe -- where they could try to manufacture an excuse to escalate to lethal force without any substantial personal risk, but this certainly wasn't that. If we're arguing about tire angle, then the officer's life was in the suspect's hands.)
As to why the cop did step in front of the car? I think incompetence is more likely than suicidal malice; the latter exists, but the former is vastly more common.
There were a bunch of people around. This woman was literally barricading the street. It was a chaotic environment.
The real harm here is that Minnesota refuses to let local LEO help ICE so that ICE would have the manpower to de escalate these situations. If there were five cop cars there, they could box the woman in, have people to deal with the crowd, and arrest the woman in an orderly fashion.
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The answer to all of your concerns is that nobody has a right to flee from the police.
People seem to be under the impression that because the law is a set of rules, and police in particular have rules that restrict how they are allowed to enforce the law, that the whole thing is like a sport or a game, where the point of the rules is to make the game fair for the players.
So of course they see the situation where a criminal is confronted by the police, and they think, how do I make it fair, so that the criminal has a chance to win the game? It's not fair if the police have too many advantages!
This is wrong. The law is written down so that everyone knows what is legal and how they can avoid committing crimes. Limitations on the police exist so that people are not unduly harassed by police unless they are sincerely suspected of a crime. None of these things exist to make things "fair" for criminals, they exist to preserve liberty for non-criminals.
The driver of the car was the one who escalated to deadly force here.
The other very strange thing that keeps happening in police use of force discussions is the inability of the anti-police side to ever ascribe any sort of agency to anyone other than the officers. The police officer escalated the situation by... standing there! He escalated it by... drawing his firearm after the driver had already started accelerating toward him! Never any room for the possibility that the driver would still be alive if she had made any of dozens of decisions leading up to that moment any differently, starting with deciding to drive from Missouri to Minnesota to harass federal law enforcement.
You mean she...CROSSED STATE LINES???
I remember a huge deal being made out of this in the Rittenhouse case; he had no legitimate interest to be there because it was in a different state so him crossing state lines to go to the protest site was evidence he was up to no good.
Sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander here. If Rittenhouse should have stayed at home whatever his feelings about the protests or wanting to do something to help, then so should this woman.
"Crossed state lines" with Rittenhouse was an attempt to paint him as having traveled a great distance out of his way to a community he had no connection to, which was false in his case since he had family and friends in Kenosha, which was about a 15 minute drive away from his house. If he had actually traveled a great distance out of his way to a community he had no connection to, one could genuinely say that he had no good reason to be there, and "he crossed state lines!" was a dishonest attempt to imply this even though it wasn't true.
Missouri is about 500 miles from Minneapolis at it's closest point, and in one of the recordings of the aftermath of this ice shooting, you can hear her wife saying that they have no local friends or relatives to turn to. So she actually did travel a significant distance out of her way to a community she had no connection to! She could have just not done that!
Would you care to bet on how much we'll hear about "but guys, she did cross state lines" from the people currently calling her an innocent martyr?
I agree with everyone saying her actions should not have been a death sentence. But with the whole mess around ICE and people turning up to protests and co-ordinating doxxing etc., this is the sort of heated, stressed, 'these people will try to injure or kill me' attitude on both sides that gets people into these situations and ending up hurt.
If you're going to turn up to a protest that has a good chance of being a "peaceful protest" (i.e. somebody is going to start smashing windows, throwing stones at the cops, setting things on fire, etc.) then you are putting yourself in a position of risk.
I don't think Rittenhouse should have been in Kenosha, but I also think he acted in genuine self-defence. I don't think this lady should have been in Minneapolis, and I do think the ICE guy acted in what he genuinely believed was self-defence. There's no winners here. She shouldn't be dead, and this guy shouldn't be vilified as the new fascist racist murderer.
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Correct, but irrelevant.
Correct, but irrelevant.
The only relevant question is 'did the shooter satisfy the conditions for self defence?' this seems very marginal. The fact alone that the officer fired through a side window while not in imminent danger is going to make things extremely difficult for him if this ever goes to court.
The Charlottesville car guy got 4 life sentences because of his attitude and motivation towards the protest beforehand.
Are you calling for him to be pardoned and compensated by the state for his unjust incarceration?
There is no relationship between these two cases.
At the very start, I saw reports or comments that the Charlottesville guy had been caught in a crowd of protesters, was trying to get clear, and accidentally ran into people. That seems to be not the case, but there's also some element (I think) of genuinely panicking and trying to get away which resulted in unintended harm. Or at the very least, he wasn't mentally all there. That makes no difference to the narrative around the entire affair, though.
What struck me most about the difference in coverage was the way the Waukesha Christmas parade car-ramming was reported. In that, at first it was all "a car ran into people" as though it were the vehicle deciding to do it, and no human agency was involved at all.
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Aside from the question how how threatening it is to drive towards someone in a car, and if your explicitly antagonistic motivation in going to a protest matters when determining guilt.
Glassnoser is around this thread arguing that lightly hitting someone with a car is no big deal. I wonder if he would think the same about bumping into a morbidly obese smoker who then has a heart attack? Or if he would blame her for putting herself in front of a car?
Saying there's no relationship is just silly. There's plenty to compare and contrast, to tease out the differences and separate reason from who/whom.
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no, the fact that a person doesn't have a right to flee from police means the woman is the initial user of unlawful force which is an element of self-defense
no, the first shot went through the windshield of a 3 shot sequence within roughly 1 second time frame which you can clearly see in the video (the glass fragments shoot up in front of the vehicle from the bullet hitting the windshield)
not that this is dispositive; a person who uses lethal force doesn't actually have to, within 1 second time frame from the point at which the cop was hit by the vehicle, realize the threat of great bodily harm or death is over (and that he wont be dragged alongside the vehicle or slip on the ice and fall under it) in order to use lethal force even if the biological lag of reality means the shots go through the side window
even if you think the above is not true and he didn't shoot through the windshield (which I would bet a significant amount of money that at least one shot went through the windshield) and he gunned the lady down as she drove by, lethal self-defense can be used in the defense of others, e.g., against a felon fleeing after committing aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (her car) driving recklessly thus putting everyone else on that street in danger including other law enforcement
and this isn't going to court because even if some unethical scumbag state prosecutor attempted to bring charges it would be immediately removed to federal court due to a federal officer engaging in lawful federal activities as an agent of the federal government and it will get thrown out at the federal level even in Minnesota
but even if it did, the only way this case brought and not immediately thrown out is because of politics and not because of questions about the legality of this use of lethal force because it is just cut-and-dried legal use of force in every state in the country and at the federal level especially when you consider you would have to disprove the self-defense claim beyond reasonable doubt
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Every still image I've seen pretty clearly shows a bullet hole in the front windshield. Close to the edge of the front, roughly where state registration tags usually go, but still the front. I'm sure some shots went through the side considering like 4 rounds were fired, but characterizing them all as being shot from the side does not seem fair.
Not an intentional characterization. The first shot indeed went through the front window. It's the subsequent shots that I think will be very difficult to justify as self defense. I know that there is a norm that cops 'mag dump' into suspects, which they then justify with the phrase 'I fired until the threat was eliminated' - which is the legal standard.
Problem is, that justification makes sense if you're talking about a guy who just pulled a gun or charged at you. It makes way less sense if the threat was a car, and you've just dodged out of the way of that car to the extent that subsequent shots then go through the side window. What is the justification for those subsequent shots? The shooter was no longer in danger. I really think those are going to be a major issue for the shooter, legally.
A sequence of 3 shots within a second are not going to be difficult to justify as self-defense. If the first is justified, the next two within a second are going to be justified. No one is required to shoot once and wait a few seconds to see what happened.
I just find it interesting as you're discovering what really happened the different facts don't seem to affect your opinion and instead you just find some other rationale why your initial opinion is still correct.
It’s not about ‘wait and see’, it’s about the fact that he is no longer in front of the vehicle.
To what are you referring?
the fact you didn't know the first shot went through the windshield proving he was in front of the vehicle when he shot 3 times within about a second
and so your motte position was 'sure, sure, maybe the first shot was fine, but what about the 2nd and 3rd shot .33 seconds later which went 6 inches to the right through the side window'
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Particularly if it turns out that the first shot was non-fatal -- which actually seems kind of likely given the location of the hole + quickdraw; he might not have even hit her at all there.
If he doesn't exactly have self-defence for the shots through the window, this would leave him only with defense of others/the public -- which might fly for a normal cop in this situation with a normal (here meaning crazed out of his mind on liquor and drugs) fleeing suspect; preventing a dangerous high-speed chase, heat of the moment, etc.
In this case that seems like kind of a tough row to hoe.
Even with civilian shootings it's usually not necessary to justify each shot in a rapid sequence separately. (Whether the shots were in such a sequence was a point in the Bernhard Goetz case, IIRC)
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No. Once you establish the first shot is reasonable, the other shots within a second are also reasonable. It is a very fluid situation and LEO cannot be expected to assess within less than a second whether the threat has passed once they fire. If it was say 30 seconds later, sure. But asking them to within half a second continue to make these decisions is asking LEO to be superhuman.
Like shaken says, this is normally pretty ironclad because normally they are defending themselves from a guy with a gun etc who is hard to cross-off as a threat -- so continuing to shoot if he drops the gun or something isn't too bad.
This time, the car was clearly past him, and he had to actively turn his body to get the shot -- you could argue about target fixation or something, but based on the video I don't think it's an easy sell to a jury.
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A car is a deadly weapon and she hit him with it. The conditions for self defense do not get any more satisfied.
Not really. The standard is reasonable belief of an imminent deadly threat which can only be stopped through deadly force.
The most obvious way in which this was violated is - where was the imminent threat when the shots went through the side window?
I'm not sure about other states, but in Minnesota the law states that lethal force is permitted to resist an offense that you reasonably believe exposes you to death or great bodily harm. Nothing about this requires that the offense can only be stopped by lethal force, it simply permits lethal force under any circumstance where you reasonably believe your life is threatened.
It is absolutely unreasonable to demand a separate legal justification for every individual round fired mere fractions of a second apart, and I'm not aware of anyone who actually tries to hold human beings to that standard. The simple answer is that he stopped firing when he realized the threat was over, which is going to be some measurable amount of time after the threat was actually over because he is a human being and human beings are not capable of instantly processing information and making decisions about it. The law does not make it a felony to have human limitations, that would be stupid.
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not really; there are a maximum of five legal elements of defensive force in any state in the United States and the federal government:
your quick summary has at least 2 errors: one, it can be threat of death or serious/great bodily injury, and two, it is not a requirement the threat can only be stopped with deadly force
the cop was attempting to effectuate a lawful arrest of a woman obviously committing obstruction, the woman accelerates the suv which you can tell with the spinning tires turned towards the cop, hitting or about to hit someone with a car is a deadly force threat, cops do not have a duty to avoid but even if this was a regular person they could not retreat from an accelerating vehicle a few feet away from them in complete safety, and a person in that cop's circumstance could have both a subjective and objectively reasonable belief he's about to be run over
every single element is pretty cut-and-dried satisfied in this scenario and remember a prosecutor would need to disprove the above beyond reasonable doubt
Technically yes, in practice this is the same thing.
I believe this is incorrect; you may not use lethal force to stop a threat if it is obvious a non lethal force would suffice.
Although neither of these points seem relevant to this specific example. The problem the shooter will have, is that the moment he is alongside the car there is no longer any threat of any kind of injury to himself, yet he keeps firing. This will not be impossible to overcome but his defence would have their work cut out for them.
This is somewhat undermined by the fact that he actually did retreat in complete safety.
For the front shot, sure. That’s a plausible defence. Once the cop is alongside the car, however, the idea that he would be afraid of “slipping on the ice” or being “dragged under the vehicle” and that the only remedy to that threat is to keep firing shots into the driver is weak as hell. Good luck convincing a jury that a reasonable person would feel the same way. No, if he ever does find himself in court over this, the best bet to defend against those shots would be either ‘defence of others’ or ‘heat of the moment’, neither of which is great. I sure as shit wouldn’t want to be facing down a jury in his shoes.
no, they're not "practically" the same thing as one is not always the other
based on what? your legal experience? your sleuthing on google? vibes?
and that's not what you wrote, you wrote "which can only be stopped through deadly force"
no, he will not have a problem making the defense that 3 shots over 1 second which started in front of the car when he was struck by the accelerating car are also justified
and again, a person can use deadly self-defense force in defense of others which would also fit this scenario because a fleeing felon who just committed aggravated assault with a deadly weapon which she was still driving is an imminent deadly threat to others, including other law enforcement
he got hit by the car so he was, in fact, not able to retreat in complete safety which is the standard
and even if he wasn't hit by the car, the after-the-fact knowledge he retreated without being injured doesn't mean it wasn't reasonable for him to think he could not retreat in complete safety when he 3 feet in front of an accelerating vehicle
and again, law enforcement has special carveouts for any duty to retreat even in the 11 states which have this duty (mainly, they de facto do not have one) because otherwise law enforcement couldn't enforce laws without wholly giving up their right to lawful self-defense
that's not the standard; the standard is the jury must have zero reasonable doubt the above is wrong
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I think the reason why the officer stepped in front of the vehicle was because they intended to arrest her. Blocking the road with an apparent intension to prevent the work of ICE officers is a crime. They didn't want her to get away. They wanted her in custody.
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I don't think this is true at all. The justification in question is "my life was in danger so I had to use deadly force". Who actually manufactured this situation?
Woman:
ICE agent:
Standing in front of a parked car, which is what the ICE agent did, does not put a life in danger. He could have stood there all day, all year, until the end of time, and he still would not have been in danger from that car. The entire situation, and the entirety of the danger, was manufactured by the woman. She sought out confrontation, and when she got it she escalated with violence right up to the point where she got her brains blown all over her dashboard.
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It doesn't even need to be a car. Imagine a suspect is running away on foot. If the officer is off to the side or behind, they aren't justified in shooting. If they're in front, they can probably shoot the person charging at them.
I don't believe that suspects have the right to an escape route or that the police are bloodthirsty enough to manufacture an excuse to kill random people, so I don't have the same conflicted feelings as you.
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I agree it's bad policy to have an officer stand in front of a vehicle. The escalation is one factor. But it also just blatantly puts officer lives at risk in a totally unnecessary way.
They have vehicles nearby, they have the persons plates, and even eye witnesses on the person driving. If they make a run for it they are fucked and not getting far.
If something is going to be placed in front of the vehicle it should be a police vehicle.
I guess this is an angle I also didn't think about that is relevant. If you are attempting to stop someone fleeing with an officer's body there is almost always an alternative. Like, the first truck they arrived in could have just parked in front of the victim's vehicle? A different vehicle goes around it moments before!
This is indeed department policy for most normal police organizations. (Blocking the suspect's vehicle in with a car where feasible)
I'm not against what these guys are doing or anything, but I will say that based on the first part of the video their training might not be the most modern; either that or they are all sick and tired of being yelled at and obstructed all the time...
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I will concede that you have a point here, but I think the typical reverse argument, that police should uniformly just let someone go to prevent immediate violence is also a slippery slope. No-high-speed-chase policies were perhaps well-intentioned (such chases do often end in death and destruction, often to bystanders), but the precedent of "if you just drive 90mph they have to let you go" led to its own forms of lawlessness. Policies to not (immediately [1]) arrest people that risk enough police/bystander lives are their own incentives to always escalate. Law enforcement is mostly-uniquely given the arrest power for a reason.
I do not think that this is at all incompatible with Gillitrut's point.
Unprovoked escalation by any side is bad. If a cop has the option to either park a stroller in front of a suspects car or place his own car there for the purpose of impeding an escape, then it seems reasonable to require them to use their car, which will mean that the suspect will be less likely to escalate to deadly violence if they try to escape. (If it is fine to use a suspects unwillingness to endanger innocents to detain them, then SWAT forces should be wearing babies instead of kevlar vests.)
Some jurisdiction have a concept of self-defense being limited if the actor specifically provoked the self-defense situation. Placing a human in front of a car, or handcuffing yourself to the car for that matter, will do very little to impede the movement of the car. It is purely meant to create a situation where you will be able to claim self-defense or file additional charges.
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I guess to my mind the underlying crime is obviously relevant to what means are justified in arresting or stopping the suspecting. You've got a murderer with a hostage? By all means, high speed chase. Use deadly force. You think someone has an illegal quantity of drugs? Probably no high speed chase or deadly force. This latter is outside the context of self-defense of course. If guy with drugs pulls a gun on you, feel free to escalate appropriately. The point is that there needs to be a proportional relationship between the means and the crime.
But if you make it trivially easy to evade enforcement of non-capital crimes, it's unclear why anyone would do anything other than evade all the time.
I think there is a wide gap between "lethal force" and "trivially easy."
Criminals in Chicago know that the police won't chase them due to recent changes in policy so they just turn everything into a chase and never get apprehended.
This led to a substantial increase in crime.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/12/4/23988293/chicago-police-cpd-vehicle-pursuit-chase-policy-civilian-commission-consent-decree
The proponents of these types of policies like yourself seem to think people get startled or have an overreaction to being pulled over and then once they've collected their faculties, will willingly turn themselves into the police station.
Criminals are NOT like you and me (i.e. people who after committing an impulsive crime would turn themselves in) and are happy to try to run away every time from the police - thus the increase in crime.
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I don't think there's a wide gap between "trivially easy" and "drive away really fast, oh and the police are not allowed to block you"
Just because they don't block your car doesn't mean you got away scot-free. They can follow you, block roads, use spike strips or PIT maneuvers to make you lose control in a way that's unlikely to be lethal, and so on.
Even if (they let) you get away, they can use your license plate to find out where you live, and arrest you at home. In addition to whatever you were suspected of before, you're now guilty of evading the police too. If you commited traffic violations while fleeing, those wil be added too. If they chased you, your car is likely to get wrecked.
All in all, plenty of good reasons to comply if you're innocent or guilty of a relatively small offence only (e.g. DUI). In short, it's not trivially easy to evade arrest if the police is not generally allowed to shoot drivers of vehicles.
Sorry if I misunderstand, but isn't this just high-speed chases again?
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If you just drive away fast, they won't be able to follow you or know where you went if they can't chase you. And obviously they can't PIT you without chasing you.
Just do what a lot of my city's residents do: don't have a license plate. If they try to stop you for not having a license plate, drive away really fast. Not having a license plate is not a serious crime, so they're not allowed to chase you.
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It is literally a policy officer's jobs to escalate in order to enforce the law. That is what it means to have a monopoly on violence.
The purpose of ICE is to enforce immigration law. While it could be the case that detaining a citizen in a car was required to enforce immigration law, this is an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence.
Citizens (generally leftist white women) have been actively obstructing the enforcement of immigration law for almost a year now. One of their favorite tactics is using their cars to block ICE agents and vehicles. I could see how this might seem like an extraordinary claim if you've paid zero attention to the character and nature of the anti-ICE protests for the last year.
Ok, I will grant you that she was very likely trying to obstruct immigration enforcement and they had probable cause to detain her.
I would still argue that standing in the way of her car was a bad call to make.
There are certainly cases when I would want cops to risk their own lives and the lives of a suspect rather than letting them escape, for example if they are dealing with a mass shooter, where any failure to detain them will likely lead to more people being killed.
However, the driver of this car does not seem to be such a case. They had her license plate, they had her on bodycam footage, there is no reason to suspect that she was planning any terror attacks. "If she panics and drives away, we will just charge her with reckless driving and refusal to comply with a lawful order on top of the obstruction charge, it is not like she will escape to Argentina to escape justice."
In an isolated case, sure. For this repeated, consistent ideologically driven nonsense there's no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt that she won't just turn around and blockade them again, newly emboldened by the lack of consequences. At this point, what the protestors are doing is functionally a heckler's veto on law enforcement. Speaking as a person whose side just won an election on enforcing that law in particular, I want the book thrown at these idiots.
In support of this - I've seen reporting indicating that the ICE crew was followed around and harassed for hours while trying to carry out operations, with further witnesses stating this woman was a part of that.
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That does not justify any escalation to enforce any law. Policy officer's can't shoot a jaywalker to stop them from jaywalking.
They can shoot a jaywalker who continues to disobey lawful orders and who meets force with force all the way until the situation becomes deadly.
We have laws like this that defer to subjects and we have laws like this that defer to law enforcement. It's situational, but driving with an officer grabbing onto your hood in a tense situation is not a good idea, even if you think you're in the right.
I will say though, this shooting could be legally justified, but optically it doesn't look good. They are also in Somalieapolis, Minnesota, so I expect a large protest and candle light vigils and Democratic politicians demanding further law enforcement castration that will reinforce their immigration policy and their version of anarcho-tyranny.
Its just awful optically, only one shot actually went through the windshield, the rest were through the driver side window, meaning the car was past the officer by the time he really punched her ticket. By the time he unholstered, the wheels were pointing away from him, too. Not that this really matters, in that if she actually wanted to smoosh him or another officer she could have obviously turned the car around/started reversing and she had technically already acted to smoosh him (while turning so as to not smoosh him, but still). Doesn't change the legality, but it just looks awful. If the left had any credibility, this would be an excellent time to use it to argue against ICE overreach. Alas, they've cried wolf a few thousand times too many.
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He simply stood in a spot. That's is not the same as shooting a jaywalker or even remotely comparable. That is just a dishonest comparison.
The point is that not all escalations to enforce all laws are justified. I think it bad when police officers manufacture justifications to escalate.
Okay. I agree not all escalations are justified. I think the escalation of standing in a spot so that the suspect cannot simply leave is justified.
Isn't this approach going to unnecessarily put the lives of police officers in danger? Sure, if you're dealing with a reasonable person who committed a crime of passion or something they're going to think twice about running over a cop, but if you're looking at a career criminal who will already be getting a life sentence if they get caught... why wouldn't they just run the cop over?
Eventually, the people willing to die to attack a police officer standing in front of their car will all be dead and the problem solves itself.
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I am not sure that I agree, in all cases.
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