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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 mean, running from the cops shouldn't be a death sentence, but trying to run them over should be. Not hard to make the distinction.
Running from the cops shouldn’t be a death sentence, but it is a death gamble. If the officers primary duty is to make sure you are maximally safe while fleeing and to avoid any putting themselves between you and your exit, then the law stops existing for criminals. This is anarchotyrrany.
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I think she was trying to run more than run him over, but also hammering the accelerator with a guy in front of you makes it a reasonable take from the guy in front of you you want to run him over.
What I can’t tell is whether that is true. That is, did she veer because he pulled a gun or was she always going to veer.
To my eye, it looked like a failed three-point turn. She started forwards with her wheels to the left, but turned them continuously rightwards as she went. This angle (from here) is the best I saw.
My parse of the video was that she was going straight till she was shot, likely slumped and that pulled her wheel to the right.
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Is the important point of the law here what her actual intent was (especially since it's now impractical to ask her) or what her perceived intent by the shooter was? I think both her and the shooter were probably panicking as is the norm in high-stress situations, but there was enough for the shooter to reasonably believe that he was under threat.
Sure it’s legally irrelevant. It is politically relevant.
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I don't see anything inconsistent with "It was valid self defense, and the person who was shot did not commit a crime to trigger it." It doesn't apply here (she shouldn't have obstructed the street or resisted arrest or fled or drove at the officer), but honest misunderstandings can have tragic outcomes with nobody at fault.
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Cops should be willing to take some risks to serve and protect the public. Which most cops are, because they have a sense of civic responsibility to the town they live in. That's the problem with having masked federal agents roaming the country shoving random people into the back of a van. They don't know anyone in the neighborhood they're supposedly "policing", and they begin to see the people as pests getting in the way of meeting their monthly deportation quota.
The nation could have functional normalized deportation enforcement. Cities could assist with ICE warrants just as they assist with other federal law enforcement. Cities might negotiate federal presence in specific areas or even coordinate arrests. If not oversight or assistance local police could bear witness as third parties more interested in the well-being of residents. Politicians could endorse organized protests while explicitly condemning vigilante efforts to interfere with federal law enforcement. These things could be done and relationships built while maintaining a meaningful opposition to Trump and ICE. There seem to be enough lawyers to obstruct 3 Trumps worth of deportation.
Alas, this is not the world we have built. Instead, we have sanctuary cities that have police forces forbidden from participating in this manner. We have politicians whose safest electoral option is to do nothing and order everyone else to do nothing. Except for the citizens who receive a fiery speech about invaders and the virtue of obstruction. All with a wink and a nod. The electorate responds, the inevitable occurs, and the winks and nods pays dividends in the form of a most exciting news story.
The more I see this play out the more I think this is the only way this was ever going to happen.
My city has more important things to do than deporting our own labor force. The police aren't "forbidden", our sheriff is elected by the people, and the people don't want him to spend resources on this nonsense. That's democracy in its purest form. If people don't want to live in our city, they can leave and go to a city and/or state with policies they agree with. That's why states' rights is such a good system.
The lack of internal hard borders is a major part of the draw of federation in the first place, and the USA's Constitution is broadly set up to prevent them (states are not allowed to refuse entry to citizens of other states). At the point where you're proposing bringing in internal hard borders, you're in practice talking about dissolving the USA along partisan lines (and possibly annexing the blue chunk to Canada, so that it's contiguous again). This is a colourable position, and one @FCfromSSC has been spruiking here for a while, but it's a rather-big ask; I would remind you of what happened the last time a chunk of the USA decided to secede.
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People leaving a city does not fix the dysfunction and chaos resulting from the city refusing to work with ICE.
That's still just forbidding the police from cooperating with ICE. A distinction without a difference.
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It is not reasonable to tell them that one of the risks they have to assume is not being allowed to defend themselves from being murdered.
Words have meanings. There is nothing random about identifying people who have broken a specific law and sending them back to the specific countries they are citizens of.
Even under the most charitable assumptions for the police, there was at most a small chance she was trying to run him over. I don't think it's unreasonable to say the police cannot always kill someone just because they think the person might be trying to kill them. I also think the police have a duty to avoid unnecessarily creating situations where they don't know whether someone is about to kill them if they're going to respond to that uncertainty by killing someone.
She literally hit him with her car. It's on video. You can just watch it. There's three different angles in the top post. He's folded over on the hood. I never cease to be amazed at the willingness of people to refuse to believe their own eyes.
Now, I will grant that with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that she was probably a) distracted by the officer at her window, and thus unaware of the officer in front of her car, and b) she was likely attempting to flee rather than actually kill anybody
But this is hindsight. This is information we can gather by looking at the video from the comfort of our phones and laptops and replaying the footage until it makes sense.
A person can be reasonable in believing something, even if that thing is not true, if the information available in that moment led them to believe that thing. It is not a felony to not be omniscient.
What are you trying to say with the word "might"? It's already not legal for anyone, including police officers, anywhere in the US, to use lethal force if you suspect your life is in danger, with low probability. It is settled case law that the use of lethal force requires that a person should reasonably believe, with the information available to them, that their life is in danger. This is a higher standard than "might," and it is definitely met when you are a police officer and a criminal suspect hits you with their car.
The person who was shot drove herself over 500 miles from Missouri to Minneapolis, used her car to barricade a street against federal law enforcement (a federal crime), and tried to escape when they tried to arrest her, striking one of them.
Which of these decisions were the cops responsible for? How did the cops "create" this situation? I would be amazed if any law enforcement officer had told her to do any of these things!
What on earth are you talking about here?
It looked more to me like he leaned towards the car. But even if you're right, he didn't get run over even though he was hit. Why not? Why is he folded over the hood and sidestepping instead of getting caught under the car? Because the car was going in a different direction. That is the key fact here. He planted his feet as she drove towards him and only started to move out of the way at the very last second. Then he walked away seemingly totally fine. Why would he have done that if there was a risk of him getting run over? He could see which direction her wheel were turned in. He could see where the car was going. Yet he stayed where he was and it worked out for him. It seems to me he knew exactly what he was doing and did not think he was about to be run over, or else he would have gotten out of the way.
It's not hindsight. It's his job. If he is going to stand in front of large vehicles and shoot their drivers, he needs to be able to quickly assess the situation. The whole scene was right in front of him. He could see her and the other officer. He knew what was going on. And if he is going to be carrying a gun and given special leeway to enforce the law with it, he needs to be held to a high standard for situational awareness, and if he felt at all not up to the task at any moment, he needed to take steps to reduce the danger he was putting himself and others in.
This is the problem with so many of these arguments defending police killings. The police are professionals who should know how to handle these types of situations and who deliberately put themselves and others into dangerous situations. They have a lot of control over the situation. They often don't need to be where they put themselves and don't need to have taken the actions that led them to the situation where they felt the need to use deadly force.
They're responsible for all reasonably foreseeable outcomes of the situations that they create. Yes, they sometimes need to quickly respond to what criminals are doing and they don't always have the option of just walking away. But they're supposed to know how to steer situations towards a reasonable outcome. Standing in front of cars when you don't know how to react to the car driving towards you is not something they should be doing.
This is like excusing a doctor from a killing a patient on the operating table because he cut open a patient without knowing how to sew him back up. Yes, of course, if you randomly find someone with his guts hanging out, you shouldn't get in trouble for not helping him, nor is it the doctor's fault that the patient is in need of the surgery in the first place. But when the doctor decides he is going to be the hero and do life saving surgery, he is responsible once he cuts the patient open. He is supposed to know what to do and if he doesn't, he needs to leave the patient alone and either find someone else to do the surgery or provide a different treatment.
He's responsible for standing in front of the vehicle. The doctor isn't responsible for the person getting sick, but he doesn't need to cut him open if he can't do that without killing the patient.
Look, exactly nothing from your wall of text matters here.
It is legally permissible to respond to an assault with a deadly weapon with lethal force. That's it. It doesn't matter where he stands, or how omniscient he is, or what he coulda-woulda-shoulda done according to a monday morning quarterback on the internet with the benefit of hindsight. She drove a car into him. That is assault with a deadly weapon. He is legally entitled to respond with lethal force. Case closed.
It's not legally permissible to respond to an assault with a deadly weapon with lethal force if there is no threat to bodily harm. Nor is it necessarily permissible if you provoked the situation. I can't run onto the tarmac of an airport and start shooting down landing aircraft with artillery because of my, at that point, reasonable fear that a plane landing on top of me is a danger to my life. It doesn't matter if I don't have time to get out of the way by the time the plane is about to land. It's my fault for putting myself in that situation. There are limits to what I can do to create a dangerous situation for myself that leave lethal force as the only option to save my life.
He knew or should have known that, if a car was driving towards him, he would shoot and kill the driver, yet chose to stand in front of a moving car. Then when the car did appear to be driving towards him, he failed to take the opportunity to get out of the way and instead stood his ground, drew his weapon, and then leaned towards the car as it turned away and fired at the moment the car brushed past him. Then he fired two more shots as the car drove away from him.
Even if we grant that the car was a deadly threat, how does that excuse firing twice after it was no longer a threat? How can even the first shot be justified when he knew or should have known that the killing not have stopped the car?
You have a right to kill someone if it is necessary to protect yourself. If shooting her didn't help him, then he had no right to do it.
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In none of the videos do I see the officer folder over the hood, or even significantly struck.
Oh dear. You should schedule a trip to the optometrist right away.
Look I don’t know what to say. By now I’ve seen a dozen slow-motion versions of these clips. He was not materially struck.
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This sarcasm does not further the discussion.
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Remember that "citibike Karen" incident that went viral a while back? Where a group of young black men accused a white pregnant woman of stealing a bike from them? I remember a lot of the response to that, even before it came out it was all bullshit, was "how fucking dumb can you be, how ideologically motivated, that your narrative of events could completely upend what everybody knows about how the world works." Or things to that effect. And they were right.
Now we have an incident where the same people who were making those (ultimately correct) mocking posts have turned around and decided that it was more likely that a mother of three decided to go out in a blaze of glory killing ICE agents with her car, rather than a bunch of twitchy gung-ho goons lit her up with little provocation.
I mean, you can just watch the video that shows her driving her car directly into a cop. I'm not sure what's "twitchy" and "gung-ho" about believing that the person who just intentionally drove their car into you might intend you harm.
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A woman going home from her job, vs a gang of the usual thugs.
A woman going out of her way to go to a protest and disrupt police, vs an officer doing his job.
These are not equivalent.
I think Ashli Babbitt's the easiest case to equivocate to this one and was a substantially worse shoot than this.
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I am confused. What is/was your take on citibike Karen?
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It's entirely possible, probable even, that she both (a) didn't intend to kill ICE agents, but also (b) provoked them quite seriously. ICE agents have been attacked with vehicles already, so it's not all that unreasonable they would anticipate that possibility, and she accelerated right at one in the process of attempting to flee their traffic stop (already a potential felony).
If ICE thinks it's that likely that someone would try to run them over, they shouldn't be deliberately standing in front of vehicles to try to stop them. That only works and is only safe if they know the driver won't do that.
[NormanRockwellFreedomOfSpeech.jpg] I think it is okay for law enforcement officers to shoot people who are willing to run them over.
Yeah I think it's reasonable department policy to suggest police don't stand in front of cars to reduce their chance of getting run over but on the other hand that doesn't mean attempting to run them over isn't a crime and massive escalation of a scenario.
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Yeah, I think that johnfabian is presenting a bit of a false dichotomy here:
It looks to me like (1) the woman's intention was to flee in her car; and (2) the ICE agent nevertheless reasonably perceived that he was being attacked either intentionally or knowingly.
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