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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.
From my viewing of the video, it seems clear that the driver tried to run over the ICE agent first, at which point the agent responded by opening fire. Could have been handled better, but still a justified shooting.
Not at all. She was turning to the right. Maybe it's still a justified shooting because the officer couldn't read her mind, but if she wanted to run him over, she could have.
It isn’t clear to me that she didn’t turn right after the officer pulled the gun (ie but for the gun pull, she would’ve ran over the officer)
Stop the video at 14.5 seconds and go frame by frame, look at the position of the left front wheel relative to its mud flap. It made a fluid motion; it never stopped turning to the right. There's no frame where the car's wheel was not turning towards the right.
Yeah, I watched it again, and she clearly intended to turn right from the very beginning. Her wheels started turning at the same time that she started moving forward. That's also the moment the cop pulled out his gun. So I can see how he might have thought she might have been about to drive at him when he decided to pull out his gun. However, by the time he pulled the trigger, she was well into her turn and it should have been clear to him what she was trying to do.
What you can also see if you watch carefully is that, as she was backing up, he started getting ready to take his gun out while standing still. He had a chance to get out of the way, but decided that in the case where she did drive at him, it would be better for him to kill her than to have gotten out of the way and let her escape.
You are asking the LEO to be Paul Atreides. You are assuming he knew the intent you are giving her (ie that she was going to flee). He didn’t know which direction she was going to drive and thus how difficult it would be to dodge.
Here is what he did know:
A crazy woman decided to barricade a road to prevent ICE from operating. She was refusing multiple orders and when another agent was trying to apprehend her, she backed up and then put the car into gear to drive forward.
Is it reasonable in that context to fear she might do something crazy like drive at him? Yes. In fact she did.
Is it crazy for him to be ready to draw his gun to neutralize the target? No.
I'm not saying he knew. I'm saying that he should have known her intent. If he had any reason to think it would be difficult to ascertain her intent and that that ambiguity would lead him to take her life as a precaution, he should not have stepped in front of the vehicle, and having stepped in front of the vehicle, he should have gotten out of the way at the earliest opportunity when he saw that she was going to start moving the car. What reasonable goal was he hoping to accomplish by standing in front of the car, putting both of their lives at risk?
We don't know that she was crazy and she wasn't barricading the road. She blocked one lane on a wide street. You can see a car drive past her in the video.
Regardless, even if this were all true, it doesn't mean she needed to die. He had a responsibility to minimize that risk. Someone being crazy is not an excuse to have them killed. It calls for all the more caution. If he knew she was crazy, that makes all the more irresponsible to stand in front of her vehicle while she was in the driver's seat.
Yes, and the appropriate response to that is to get out of the way, not to create a situation in which he feels the need to kill someone.
Not so long as he doesn't kill her unnecessarily, which he ended up doing. He should be actively avoiding situations where he might need to draw his weapon unless he has to be there. Nothing was accomplished by his standing in front of her car.
Even after he had made the decision to put himself in that dangerous situation, the presumption should have been that she wasn't going to run him over. Of course it was possible. But it was unlikely. If the choice is between certainly killing her and a small possiblity that she injured him (there is no way his life was in danger at that low speed), he needed to take the risk. His series of mistakes leading up to that dangerous situation doesn't give him an excuse to kill her.
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