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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.
My takes:
Almost certainly going to be called legally justified. She was accelerating her car towards him at close range; from his perspective (which is the one that matters for legal purposes) it was a clear deadly threat, plus he's a cop so he gets extra leeway for shooting people. If he was a civilian it'd be less clear cut, but I'm 95% sure it gets called legal and that's the call I'd make if i was on the jury, cop or not.
In retrospect an unnecessary shoot, you can tell by watching her wheels she wasn't trying to hit him though she did glance him. He could have probably jumped out of the way, but it'd be risky if she was trying to hit him. I don't think it's reasonable to expect cops to engage in that kind of self-risk to avoid shooting people, but I think cops should aspire to as a matter of personal virtue.
As almost always, she gets major culpability here for A)being in this situation in the first place B)not just complying C)Trying to flee in a way that could obviously be read as a deadly threat. DHS says she was attacking agents/their vehicles beforehand, idk if true but i'd bet it is; it's vanishingly unlikely this happens without her deliberately engaging against the agents. I'm not saying she deserved to die; I'm saying that she had numerous obvious off ramps from this situation she didn't take and therefore is significantly responsible for her own death. Sort of like a motorcyclist who's doing 100mph on a city street a tshirt and shorts who then has a car do an illegal U-turn in front of them, hits it, and dies: they might not be technically at fault for the specific accident but they're at fault for being in a situation where it could happen.
I think that the blue media and politicians are also majorly at fault here. They have been encouraging people to interfere with ICE, and encouraging people to interfere with law enforcement will almost inevitably get people hurt and killed. She got memed into this and died for it.
Approximately nobody is going to interpret this except through a maximally partisan lense. Our cold civil war gets a little hotter.
I think your points 3 and 4 need to be the most important part here, but nobody is going to pay any attention to them (in the broader political conversation).
The media, social media, and legislative environment are pushing people into uncontrolled interactions with the police that make "bad" and "accidental" interactions nearly inevitable.
Uncontrolled interaction with potentially violent individuals (accidental or otherwise) is an incredibly hard task to manage safely, add death threats, actual assassination attempts, and nearby braying crowds and it becomes essentially impossible to do the job without bad shit happening. It's only a matter of time, and time ran out.
If you don't want people to get shot by ICE stop encouraging your voting base/viewers to do shit that's going to get them shot by ICE.
"Is law enforcement justified in whatever violent action they took" is a different question than "did you encourage these people to do shit that got people killed."
I am tired of commentariat and the general political conversation ignoring this part of the equation.
Showing up to police action and making the scene uncontrolled and dramatically increasing the likelihood of bad outcomes is not ethical protesting and is ineffective protesting unless you accidentally martyr someone in the "right" way.
All of this also applies to inner city policing and the other hot button topics.
It’s also turned me into a fascists. If we are still a Democracy and one side wins on dealing with migration as a key election issue then I expect the other side to live with that election. If they instead attempt to obstruct the police action that was voted on with street thugs then why should I continue to back our Democracy. If it’s a street fight then I’ll back our brown shirts. It doesn’t seem like we are a nation of laws anymore.
I already think we have too many checks and balances in our system. And it’s causing a lot of voter frustration with getting things done on both sides. In a Democracy elections must have consequences. The lefts adoption of street violence when they lose is unacceptable. So yes I voted for ICE deportations. Majority of Americans did too.
If the left doesn’t want this then they can post on twitter and try to change minds. Then try to vote in a new government. I care less about the specifics of this case but the broader field of play where obstructing the police is an acceptable political tactic now.
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One of the things that really stood out to me about BLM is that the focus was ostensibly on preventing police killings of black people, but absolutely nobody involved in the movement was saying "We want you to live, so stop resisting arrest. If you comply with the cops they will not shoot you." That advice alone would prevent 99.99% of all police shootings, but that was absolutely not part of the BLM messaging, and that's one of the things that made me realize BLM wasn't about what was on the tin.
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