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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.
Part of the bargain we make with the state is that the violence is structured, measured, constrained, fair, etc. right?
To play with the argument a bit, standing in front of the car feels like the officer is responsible for escalating the situation since now there’s a deadly weapon in play.
Presumably he stands in front of the car to make it less likely she’ll drive away, but the stakes are now higher than they probably needed to be, right?
Like imagine a police officer talking to someone ten feet away and throwing a knife on the ground in between them. The person then takes a step forward towards the officer and oh my god he’s going for the knife!
Edit: having actually watched the videos now I’m much more sympathetic to standing in front of the car—it seems like he’s walking over to the driver side to potentially help when the driver exits.
Which means you shouldn't be roughed up for shits and giggles, not that the cops should let you run away or attack them.
No, why?
Because if he’s not in front of the car, her driving forward doesn’t put his life in danger?
He’s escalated it by making escape a threat to his life when it didn’t need to be.
There is no "right to escape from cops", and if she doesn't escape, she won't be putting anyone's life in danger, so she's the one escalating.
But there is often a limit to the ability to claim self-defense when you deliberately engineered a situation for the purpose of being forced to resort to self-defense. Standing in front of a suspect's vehicle seems to fit the bill just fine. You are not physically impeding them from driving away.
If you give legal privileges to a conduct, you will see more of it. Standing in front of the car of a suspect to prevent them from escaping is reckless and will often lead to someone getting harmed. So it is logical to set the incentives so that cops will employ safer conduct instead.
Suppose you are parked next to me at the grocery store, and I am standing behind your car while I hold the cart for another person who is unloading it into the trunk. After 10 seconds of this, you become impatient and attempt to run me over with your car, and I pull out my gun and shoot you. Have I "deliberately engineered a situation for the purpose of being forced to result to self-defense?" My intuition is, no, I'm doing something that is possibly annoying, possibly grounds for being physically moved out of the way, but in no way inviting attempted vehicular homicide.
Now, you might counter that the situation with the police is different, because it starts as a hostile interaction, and the police should intuit that someone might be more likely to take that action in their case. However, this runs directly into the moral hazard that you are now legally privileging the judgment of someone who is at a minimum hostile, probably a lawbreaker and antisocial, over the conduct of someone who might be having a moment of road rage. This might make sense to people are see murderous hostility to the police as the default normal condition that requires no justification, but that's not an intuition that I share.
I mean, presumably ICE is detaining or arresting her because she's in the way and being annoying; if she's driving away (again, presumably because she decided it was no longer worth it), this removes the annoyance and the obstruction, so it seems extra odd to make it into a life or death situation when essentially the situation is about to resolve itself to almost everyone's satisfaction shortly.
This also doesn't fit your example. Standing behind your car has a clear and temporary purpose: holding the cart for someone. It's not for the purpose of obstructing the car, the car is just inconvenienced as a side effect. A better example would be the escalation into a bar fight. At some point, one person gets super close into the face of someone else. Human nature is to push the person away and out of their 'personal space'. The shove is interpreted as violence, and a punch is (or worse) is thrown. The fight starts. Any number of variants are possible. Now, responsibility for this series of events is rarely clear-cut. I would say that sticking your face a few inches away from someone else's is basically asking to get pushed away, even if the shove is the first physical thing to happen and technically bad to do. This is not a perfect analogy by any means, but the point is that it's usually understood that deliberately constraining the options of someone else brings on some responsibility to go with it. Law enforcement, presumably being trained for situations as it is literally a big part of their job, is not perfectly immune from blame simply due to their law enforcement role, and in fact it might be reasonable to expect higher standards.
Now sure, you can say that once law enforcement pulls the trigger on something, they are justified in following through, but surely not all crimes are worth equal effort in enforcing? Cops and prosecutors themselves don't even believe that as a matter of regular, daily work. There's a sliding scale of seriousness for crimes, and this one kind of seems like it's near the bottom. I'm sympathetic to arguments about avoiding accidentally incentivizing criminals to regularly escape, but obstruction seems like the worst possible crime for that worry to apply, right?
I think this is where I disagree. The officer standing behind the car is also not for the purpose of obstructing the car, it's for the purpose of effecting the arrest of the person inside the car. This is not like a bar fight at all. Arresting people engaging in obstruction of legitimate police activity is something I want more of, not less of. It seems entirely correct that the police are deliberately constraining the options of someone they are trying to arrest. That's what arrest is.
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