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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.
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.
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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