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Not immediately executing someone for doing something is not the same as allowing them to do it.
How it could be any other way is that the police don't stand in front of vehicles to try to stop them from driving away and if they drive away against police orders, they can use a number of other safe techniques for pursuing and arresting them. Standing in front of cars and shooting the drivers is way down the list of preferred options for stopping vehicles and was easily avoidable in this situation.
Okay. Let’s say they let her go and then go arrest her later at her house. Can they use force to arrest her there? What if she resists? What if she runs away? Is force / obstruction never permitted?
If it is permitted, then we need to explain why it was impermissible here
I didn't say force was impermissible here. I said killing her was impermissible. He wasn't trying to use force to arrest her. He shot her in order to kill her.
On what grounds do you assert this? He shot to stop the threat. Once the threat was over, he stopped shooting. If he for example had waited a bit and then fired (unjustified) shots later, it would be a clear indicator of murderous intent, but that's not what happened. Once deadly force is authorized, you are allowed to keep using it until the threat has passed. Whatever consequences result from your use of force is not something to care about in the moment (although police are trained to render first aid once the suspect is in custody).
That might have been the intent, but it was unreasonable because it could not have stopped the threat.
No, he didn't. He fired two shots from the side of the car when he was completely clear of its path and it was moving away from him.
But it never was authorized and he continued after the threat was passed.
Reasonableness applies to whether it was reasonable to believe that she was a deadly threat at that particular moment, and it is applied to whether the response was proportional (e.g. you cannot shoot someone who merely pepper-sprayed you), but at no point has it ever been applied to whether it could have stopped the threat. Even in a gun-on-gun situation it is not guaranteed that a gun will stop the threat. See my other reply here.
As for the rest, we are talking about a time frame of 1 second and humans are not expected to make perfect split-second decisions in such a short time frame. See my other reply here.
The argument is not that he can only shoot her if it is guaranteed to stop the threat. The argument is that if it isn't reasonable even to think it might have stopped the threat, then his self-defence claim falls apart.
Keep in mind that to be found not guilty in court, he would have to prove a reasonable doubt based on the joint probability of a series of facts. He would have to show, at least to a level that generated reasonable doubt, that it was reasonable for him to put himself in front of a moving car, that he reasonably believed the car was headed towards him and risked severe bodily harm or death at the time of each shot that contributed to her death, that he didn't have time to get out of the way, and that shooting the driver of the car was necessary to prevent that severe bodily harm or death. If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that at least one of these facts is false, his self-defence claim falls apart.
Again, there is no law that says that it must be reasonable to think that your response would have stopped the threat. A guy is pointing a gun at you, and you throw a coffee mug at him. You can throw your phone. You can throw your pen, or call him obscenities, or kick dirt at him. All of those things are legally justified, because once you are faced with an imminent deadly threat, basically everything is allowed (besides things that could cause harm to innocent people), up to and including your own deadly force.
Now obviously, it is not reasonable to think that you throwing a coffee mug had any chance of stopping him, and in no universe could a coffee mug have come even close to ending the threat. So does that mean that your self-defense claim falls apart if you throw the coffee mug, and you could be charged with assault? That doesn't make sense to me.
The car was stationary when he was walking around it, but you seem to have had this discussion already with StableOutshoot.
So I want to focus on a different point, which is that you seem to be assuming that the officer knew or should have known that she was going to move her car in that way, justifying your argument that he could have simply just stepped out of the way. This is an argument that can only be made with perfect 20/20 hindsight. And we do not judge use of force with hindsight, ever. It is extraordinarily difficult to predict, in the moment, which path a vehicle is going to take. I can agree that (just to give an extreme example) if a car is normally driving down the street in a straight line, it would be dumb for an officer to jump out in front of it and expect the driver to stop. But that's not what happened here. The car was stationary, then moved backwards and that's when the officer walked in front of it. Is that a bad tactical decision? Probably. But it would be unreasonable to expect him to know that she's now going to go forward, especially given that this all happened so quickly. In general, drivers who are non-compliant are very unpredictable and can easily maneuver their vehicles in whichever direction they want. If you view things with hindsight, you can always make an argument that the officers could have avoided "putting themselves in harm's way".
Yes, there is. That's what it means for something to be necessary to prevent the threat.
No, that is not correct. Not everything is allowed. It must be necessary to stop the threat. If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them.
It's a bad example because throwing a coffee mug could help.
No. If he was able to recognize the threat in time to take out his gun, he could have moved out of the way instead.
It's not that difficult. I grant that it may be somewhat difficult. But I don't think you appreciate that the evidence against him is cumulative. If the entire case against him hinged on him judging the direction of travel of the car, then I would agree that he should not be found guilty. But there are too many problems with his self-defence claim. The fact that he probably should have recognized which way the car was going is just one of a number of problems, all of which need to be overcome in order for him to claim self-defence.
You seem to think that he has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario at every point in order to justify self-defence, when in reality, the totality of the evidence needs to rise to a certain level.
No, it wasn't unreasonable. She was obviously in the middle of a two part turn. Why else would she be backing up?
He doesn't even need to know which way car was going to go. He just needs to recognize the possibility that she would try to drive forward and that should have been enough for him not to walk in front of the car, as he was trained not to do.
As we saw at Derek Chauvin's trial, what counts as reasonable behaviour for a police officer is determined by what his training is and what the standard procedure is, both of which if violated at multiple points.
Then what was he doing standing and blocking the car?
It's not relevant what we know in hindsight. What matters is what he should have known in the situation. He knew that he could have not stood in front of the car. He knew that he could have kept walking to get out of the way. He knew that once the car started moving he could have stepped to the side. He knew that shooting the car didn't have any chance of stopping it. He knew that shooting through the driver's side window when the car was passing him (which we now know was where the fatal shot was taken from) did not prevent any threat. And he knew any possible threat was gone by then.
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No, that effectively makes being in a car a get out of jail free card, especially if they haven't identified you yet, if the car is stolen, or the plates aren't visible etc. People learning to not be retards who try and run from cops (and who fight it in court if it's legitimately a wrongful arrest or whatever) is the only option that will lead to a stable society.
The car wasn't stolen and the plates weren't hidden. But even if they had been, why wouldn't it better for the police to simply pursue the car, stop it, pull her out, and arrest her normally? This is done all the time. What about that causes society to be unstable? It's not a get out of jail free card. It's just dealing with the situation in a way that is unnecessarily harmful to the suspect.
Because car chases put the general public in danger. I'd much rather cops just blast people like this then let them put the public at risk.
Then they shouldn't do a car chase. They have many options. I think this is absurd trade off to make. The probability of someone getting hurt if they just arrest in a her a normal way is absolutely miniscule compared to the guaranteed harm of shooting her to death. Sure, if you put a sufficiently low value on the lives of people who are committing minor crimes, you can justify any level of police brutality, but that's not a reasonable basis on which to make an argument.
They were trying to arrest her in a normal way, she chose to flee instead. I really don't know how else to explain this to you. If we implemented your (and apparently many leftists') ideals for policing, the clearance rate for all crimes would drop somewhere between 90 to 99%. I'm not exaggerating here.
I'd be willing to let that happen, in exchange for citizens being allowed to blow away criminals without fear of prosecution. But I doubt that's a deal the left would be willing to make. So no, I'm not going to stand by and let the left undermine essential rules and tools for being able to maintain public order.
The US has already implemented this ideal. It's illegal to shoot suspects to stop them from fleeing. Police, including ICE, are told not to stand in front of moving vehicles and not to shoot at their drivers.
He didn't stand in front, he wasn't in front until she reversed. And cops are absolutely allowed to stand in front of parked vehicles to keep them from fleeing.
I already addressed this in my other comment, but cops absolutely can shoot fleeing suspects if they reasonably believe they pose a threat to the cop or others. A lady whipping her car around with reckless disregard for the agents in order to escape (and, to the officer who got hit, with seeming intent to hit him) it is absolutely a justified shoot.
There's no contradiction there. He got in front while it was reversing and then stopped in front of it.
The question is not about what they're allowed to do. It's about what they're instructed to do. Going against standard practice may be legal, but it is not reasonable, particularly if is aware of the dangers involved, as he would have to have been in order to believe his life was subsequently in danger.
I agree with the first sentence, but I totally disagree with the later. It is not enough for the person to in some vague sense pose a danger. Driving at a low speed near others doesn't come anywhere close to the level of danger required to kill the driver. The threat must be one of imminent and severe bodily harm.
This idea that the police are justified in ending someone's life based on the remotest possibility of someone getting hurt is something I cannot understand.
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I like the idea of anarchotyranny in which distance running is the preferred method of determining guilt. Eliud Kipchoge would be the CEO of every company in a dicey situation and simply outrun white collar prosecution.
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Getting in front of the car with a gun is obviously not safe, but nor is a potential high-speed chase or armed standoff at the suspect's destination, both of which often happen in scenarios where the guy gets away (obviously, the last one is much less likely from a liberal woman activist, but happens often enough with regular criminals). To forestall the inevitable, I'm reading your post as making a general point about police work, and I think that training and mindset are relevant to this because it's a matter of split-second decisions, and police work is not generally about dealing with nice liberal women, it's generally about dealing with questionably-sane and questionably-armed people with nothing to lose.
If the choice is between a potential armed standoff where someone might be killed (and almost certainly won't be) and definitely killing her, definitely killing her seems like the much worse choice. It has the added benefit of not forcing a split-second decision. Remember, we're talking about someone who it appears didn't do anything other than block a lane of traffic. Would an armed standoff have been worth doing to arrest her? I don't see why they can't charge her and just wait until there is a safe opportunity to arrest her. It doesn't have to be immediate. It doesn't have to be that day or that week. Nothing about this was so serious and urgent that anyone's life had to be put at risk. This wasn't a live shooter, it was a middle-aged woman blocking a lane on a quiet residential street.
OK, I see the second sentence wasn't clear enough for you. In these high-pressure situations, you should expect officers to be running off their training and previous experience, and their training is about minimizing risks to themselves and the public across a wide set of situations, many of which are more serious threats than some lady in a car (in fact, the officer had previously been hit and dragged by a suspect in a vehicle). I'll also note that, generally, and though it's off-frame in the shooting videos, a protest in the middle of a residential street generally makes it less "quiet" at the time.
Shooting her didn't minimize the risk to themselves and to the public. It increased it dramatically (evidenced by the fact that it resulted in someone's death). Police, including ICE, are specifically trained not to do this.
I didn't know there was any protest going on. I didn't see that in any of the videos. But that just strengthens my point which is that she was not really blocking traffic, making her offence less serious.
This is all a bit moot now that we have bodycam footage showing that the officer was walking across the front of the car to get to the other side, and the driver looked straight at the officer while accelerating. I assume that "don't ever walk across the front of a car in case they suddenly try to run you over/knock you out of the way" isn't something we can realistically ask of police.
What does this even mean? Police are trained not to shoot people? Yes, they're trained not to shoot people outside of particular circumstances where that person is posing a danger to others, which she was. Your previous argument was that the officer unnecessarily put her in a position to cause that danger.
The protest (news reporting on this seems terrible, but seems like a spontaneous thing in response to an ICE arrest) was down the road and she was blocking one of the routes out. It's not "blocking traffic" like some highway sit-in, it's trying to block the officers' route out of the protest. Standing in front of the car or not, they had every right and reason to either get her to move or to detain her on the spot.
It's not bodycam footage. It was taken with his cell phone.
Why does this make the argument moot? Even if you're arguing that she saw him, which I don't think this proves, that doesn't mean he didn't unnecessarily and wrecklessly put himself in harms way. Nor does it mean it was reasonable for him to think that she was going to run him over. Nor does it mean that shooting her helped prevent his death.
That's not a good assumption because we do, in fact, already instruct police officers not to do this.
They are specifically trained not to try to stop vehicles by shooting at them.
She wasn't blocking the road though. The road had two lanes. One was free.
Yes, I'm not arguing otherwise.
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