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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22756 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

The answer to this question is prudential but at some point if you are going to enforce the law at all you have to escalate against resisters. This is true in principle regardless of edge cases.

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?

I don't think the distinction is hard to make. In the car case, the actual action (drive car forward) is instrumental to normal execution of the not-punished-by-death goal (escape), and the police freely chose to make a threat to their own safety a side effect of it; in the gun case, "point a gun at someone" is not part of any normal "escape" flow. Police standing in front of your car won't even prevent you from escaping normally, since you can easily run them over; the arrest-enhancing effect of blocking the path is entirely mediated through the circumstance that now it will be legal for police to kill you if you try to escape.

in the gun case, "point a gun at someone" is not part of any normal "escape" flow.

How isn't it? The most obvious, reliable way of escaping the police would be to shoot them, then leave.

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