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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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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 two three 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.

Part of the bargain we make with the state is that the violence is structured, measured, constrained, fair, etc. right?

Which means you shouldn't be roughed up for shits and giggles, not that the cops should let you run away or attack them.

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?

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.

That situation is different, because if you stand in the way of a car while unloading groceries, your intend is clearly not to force the driver to either stay put or escalate to deadly force. Also, it is very rare for bananas to trigger a flight response, while being faced with police arrest will trigger such a response in a small fraction of the population (and possibly a larger faction of the part of the population likely to be arrested) where suspects will risk their lives trying to escape even if they are not currently wanted for a capital crime. It is stupid, but people are predictably stupid in that way.

I would argue that intent matters. Consider the opposite situation. A police vehicle tries to pursue a suspect, but it hampered (1) by an innocent bystander crossing the road who does not realize what is going on or (2) by an activist who is placing themselves in harms way to coerce the cops to stop the pursuit. While I would want the police to try to avoid killing the person in their way in either case, I would cut them a lot more slack for grazing the activist. Placing yourself (and others) in mortal danger to coerce a behavior from others seems straightforward bad. If the coercion was also unlawful (e.g. the activist doing the blocking), I won't cry to much if they break their leg in the process.

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