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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.
Classic noncentral fallacy. When you say "fleeing the police", the audience imagines an unarmed person running away, not a person trying to run over a policeman with a giant hunk of metal. Sure, fleeing the police alone should not result in deadly force, as it is not imminent danger to the policeman. "Fleeing" in form of ramming the policeman with the vehicle should elicit immediate deadly response, as it is a deadly threat. If you can not flee without threatening deadly harm to the policeman - well, you are fucked, do not flee, or try and eat the bullet. It doesn't even have to be the police - if you try to murder anybody with a vehicle, they have obvious right to self defense. The victim being the police just aggravates it, because the criminal must have known attacking the police is a crime - any sane adult does - and did it anyway.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794
I think this video makes it pretty clear she was not trying to run him over.
It does nothing of the sort. And after this one: https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-new-video-shows-moment-ice-agent-was-rammed-by-renee-good-from-officers-pov it is pretty clear they were intent on confronting ICE officers - they clearly said so - and were not fleeing anything. You do not tell people "come at us!" when you are fleeing.
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I think it's worth noting that even if she did not intend to kill or harm the officer, at a minimum (1) she was driving recklessly; and (2) attempting to flee the authorities. I don't know what the law is in Minnesota, but I think that in most jurisdictions if you are fleeing the authorities, drive recklessly in doing so, and kill someone in the process, you are guilty of murder, or at least some kind of aggravated homicide.
And, on top of that, the whole event was following at least two crimes already committed by her - intentionally impeding a law enforcement action (that's why she was there at the first place) and refusing to follow a legal order of a law enforcement officer.
Yeah, and that raises a whole other issue. As a democratic republic, we have a system in place to decide on our public policies. People vote for elected representatives and an executive who respectively make and enforce the law. In this case, congress has decided that it should be illegal for non-citizens to enter into (or stay in) the United States without a proper visa. And the president has decided to make a priority of enforcing the law.
Having lost at the ballot box, these activists have decided to play the role of the sore loser, breaking laws that are reasonable and fair and obstructing the enforcement of other laws that are reasonable and fair. Which isn't to say that what they are doing is per se immoral, just that society should not be overly accommodating of these sore loser types.
Interestingly, Leftists showed that they were aware of this principle when they repeatedly (and falsely) accused Kyle Rittenhouse of violating gun laws to show up at protest in Wisconsin with a semi-automatic rifle. And to the extent they have a point: A person who decides to take the law into his own hands and shows up aggravates an already tense situation had better be on his very best behavior. Which Kyle Rittenhouse was, but this Good woman was not.
I already see here leftists comparing Good to the American revolutionaries attacking the redcoats, so it looks like they do not see themselves bound by any social contract or agreements when they are on the losing site. If they win the elections, then it's "remember our democracy, you should submit to the will of people!" but if they lose, it's "we do not have to follow a bunch of Hitlers, we are the resistance!".
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From the videos, it seems implausible that the officer would have died if he had not shot her, though. It seems like the appropriate response is just to send her plates to the cops and arrest her for fleeing/reckless.
That may be, but from the officer's perspective, making a decision in about a quarter of a second, it may have reasonably seemed as though this woman posed a grave danger to him; to his fellow officers; and/or to the public at large.
I would say it depends on the officer's assessment of the level of danger she posed.
But we have the ability to assess the officer's assessment. In my view, something is going quite wrong if the officer assesses a currently unmoving car that he is standing not centered in front of as a potentially fatal threat.
Are you saying that he opened fire before the car started moving?
No, I am saying that has was positioned such that in the event the car did start moving, he could have easily moved out of the way, as indeed he did.
So you are saying that after the car started moving the officer knew that he could easily get out of the way?
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How "easily" is that, when he still got hit? And that was with the ice on the road making the wheels spin in place for a while.
Also, are you sure you're not moving the goalposts? You said he assessed a "currently unmoving car" as a threat, when he didn't do anything until the car started moving.
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The problem is that the police can convert actual fleeing into threats to the police through their own actions, and then use the threat to justify killing the suspect. Police love to game the system.
She was an innocent insurrectionist who didn't do anything! Corrupt cops planted that SUV!
I just warned you, and I also banned @satanistgoblin for similar low-effort sarcastic sneering.
Your record is not as bad as his, but it's getting there. You at least have AAQCs as a mitigating factor, but I still think you need to go take a breather for a day. This case seems to be getting everyone amped up. Come back less emotional.
Ironically, that was one of the least heated posts I made in that 24hr span. My mood was tongue-in-cheek joking. "Cops planted that SUV" sounds like a Gun Rack line. Ah well, text and tone, name a less iconic duo.
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Should the Bostonians have considered not throwing snowballs at the redcoats? Probably, but I would still cheer them on if I were there in person. The world sometimes need excessively brave and stupid people.
So, you are saying Renee Good is actually participating in a revolution against the government of the United States, with the purpose to violently overthrow it and establish a new one? I don't think the rest of the Left is going to agree to say it in the open, but if so, ok. Then I am not sure why you expect anything but a violent response - how do you think a violent revolution works? Either you seize the power or you get hanged (or shot), that's how the revolution works.
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No, they can't. They can remove the option of fleeing-without-conflict, but that's all. She chose to drive at the officer when she could've chosen to stop.
Are you going to claim that the police can convert a normal walk to the grocery store into assault on an officer through their own actions as well?
Just because they can't convert every situation into assault on an officer doesn't mean that they can't do it at all.
That wasn't my claim. I'm saying there's none, ever. Either the suspect chose to assault the officer by their own free will (constrained by the situation, of course), or there was nothing a reasonable person could have done and it wasn't a justified shooting.
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They can -- if you're fleeing they can literally run into your path and blame you (criminally) if you can't avoid them. That isn't, however, what happened here.
Have you ever heard of a situation where a driver was:
That seems completely backwards both for the elements of the offenses and the levels of proof required. Needless to say, I've never heard of it happening, and I'm having a hard time imagining it outside of cartoonish logic.
Yeah, Maryland cops used to step in front of vehicles to stop them for speeding. Some drivers got nailed for hitting them. I think they stopped the practice some years ago, for obvious reasons.
What's preventing good drivers from avoiding charges? As far as I can tell, the drivers can simply drive well and not get charged with anything.
I'm not seeing it. If you're going to blame the police for creating a speed trap that constrains how people can drive, then you might as well blame construction workers for creating a work zone for the same reason.
Good drivers can't drive the speed limit.
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I mean if you hit somebody with a car you are always gonna be at least in jeopardy for "failure to yield to pedestrians" or something -- if that someone is a cop it's probably more like "failure to stop when directed by an officer or whatnot" -- 50 Felonies a Day may be an exaggeration, but 50 Traffic Violations a day really isn't.
Then don't do that. Or if it's unavoidable, argue the point and easily win in court.
Um, yeah -- like, definitely you shouldn't run into people with your car! Don't do that, 100% agreed.
"Unavoidable" is a tricky thing in a car though -- if you didn't have time to avoid something in the road, maybe it's because you were driving too fast for road conditions; there are a lot of potential traffic laws you can break.
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No win in court is easy for a civilian.
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You more or less staked out my position, and the important point is that most situations involving self defense are hard to apply boilerplate to. Often each one is unique to itself. We saw this with Rittenhouse as well, his incredible trigger discipline rubbed some people as evidence that he was a madman, others recognized it as a display of calmness in chaos and good training. I am typically inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the person claiming self defense, not just police, but also to someone who's in the opposite situation, that of being a driver being surrounded by a mob of people. It is very difficult to re-create from video the real world tensions and feelings that were being generated. Was the lady actually trying to kill him? Probably only she, the officer, and maybe his partner have any real insight, and one of those 3 is dead.
There are of course corner cases. This is not one of them. If you have a police officer standing in front of your vehicle, you do not drive forward. In fact, you do not drive anywhere at all when the police officer is near your vehicle, until they clearly tell you you can go. But most of all, you do not drive forward when the said forward is occupied by the body of the police officer. Nothing unclear here. Just as nothing unclear was in Rittenhouse's case - the thugs clearly were about to inflict grave bodily harm (look up Andy Ngo if you want to see what happens when the victim is not armed), so self-defense is justified.
It does not matter. The concept of self-defense does not require psychic powers. You don't need to know what the attacker really thinks - you only need to know their actions would cause a reasonable person to fear for their life and bodily integrity. Having a car driving over you is certainly one of these things that would, whatever the driver might be thinking about at that moment.
I don't think anyone is disputing that she did something wrong. The problem is that the police officer a) created the dangerous situation by walking in front of her car while she was backing up then stopping right as she was about to start driving forward and b) pointlessly stood there and pulled out his gun, shooting her instead of getting out of the way. Self-defence has to at least be plausibly necessary to protect your life. And you can't claim self-defence if you're unnecessarily walking in front of moving vehicles in the middle of the road.
No he did not. Walking in front of you car does not represent any danger to you. And she should not be driving anywhere while the police instructs her to stop. You are fishing for excuses to justify the situation which she entered voluntarily, with clear intent to impede police work, and escalated voluntarily, operating heavy vehicle in immediate vicinity of people - while her "wife" is filming, so that was clearly intended to stir up some shit and get some propaganda pictures maybe. OK, she got what she wanted. And it's entirely, absolutely, 100% her fault - at any moment of it, starting from 12:01am that day and ending the moment she was shot, she could stop and exit the situation, and she would be alive and well. She constantly made the choices that drove her towards the ending that happened.
Do you really expect somebody to buy this? It's such a low-effort BS it's embarrassing. No, it wasn't a situation of a policeman just jumping into traffic on a random street. She knew why the officers were there, there were no "moving vehicles" except her and she drove there specifically and purposely to engage the officers. The police does not owe her - a criminal - the duty to run away from her. And in the situation she was in - vehicle stopped with people surrounding it - while she was in no immediate danger - moving the vehicle in a way that endangers the people is initiation of violence, thus justifying the response. That would be true even if she was not a criminal, intentionally confronting the police officers on duty, which she was.
Then why was he so afraid for his life that he shot and killed her?
That being true doesn't give the police the right to kill her. The police cannot kill you for disobeying them.
I did not justify anything that she did. It's possible for the police to encounter someone who is doing something unjustifiable and still not have the right to kill them.
Let's say that she had run over the police officer and we were arguing over whether that were justified. You could say the exact same thing about the police officers actions. He went against his training and did something stupid and walked in front of a moving vehicle and didn't get out of the way when it started moving towards him. Would that justify her actions just because he did something wrong?
No, it's possible for two people to both be doing things they shouldn't be doing and to both contribute to the outcome.
You need to watch the video taken from the front. He walked in front of the car while she was backing up. People don't look forward when they back up, so it's unlikely she saw him. Then he stopped in front of her just as she was about to start driving forward.
Even if she isn't allowed to drive away, the police officer legally cannot deliberately place himself in the path of her vehicle and then claim self-defence.
This is an absurdly loose definition of violence, but even initiation of actual violence doesn't justify killing someone in self-defence if it doesn't amount to an imminent threat of severe bodily harm, and driving wrecklessly does not rise to that level.
If the police encountered someone speeding on the highway, do you think they'd be justified in shooting the driver just beause they had "initiated violence" by endangering others?
Are you being purposely obtuse here? You know why - because she tried to run him over with her car. It's on video. It's had been mentioned in this discussion dosens of times. How anybody engaging in good faith in this discussion could not know that?
No, it can not. It can kill you for trying to kill them. And that's what happened. You are being purposely obtuse again by making it sound like only one second of the whole event happened and other events, immediately preceding and following it, did not, while you perfectly know they did.
It is possible, in theory. In this case, however, trying to kill a police officer with her car does justify the response. We are discussing a specific event, and you keep purposely ignoring the actual circumstances of the event, while making theoretical statements.
I think by this point it is clear you are not interested in discussing the particular event, but interested in extracting something like "since there could be a theoretical situation where police shooting would be wrong, the police can be wrong, therefore you just admitted the shooting is not justified!". I do not have any interest in this kind of discussion. When you are interested to discuss facts you may continue with somebody else.
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I don't see why it matters that this person was supposedly a "police officer." I disagree with calling ICE employees police officers, but even if he was, that doesn't give him special privileges. If you surround someone's car aggressively, it's understandable for them to react in a self-preserving manner. Even if the arrest is justified, no human can be blamed for not wanting to be detained. Almost every video I've seen of someone being arrested, they resist at least a little bit at first. Nobody likes to be in captivity.
In the matters of self-defense, it does not matter much, the rules of imminent danger are for everybody (though police officers probably will get more leeway in court afterwards). It matters in the context - obstructing police officer is a crime. Refusing lawful orders of a police officer is a crime. Nothing in it justifies deadly force - since our legal system does not have summary in-situ execution as a criminal punishment - but it at least justifies an arrest. If the person being arrested resists with deadly force - then using deadly force in response becomes justified too.
I'll remember it for the next time the leftist rioters block the streets, I am sure you would unconditionally support running them over. However, self-preserving manner in case of encountering police officers - and here's where it is relevant - is stopping the car, shutting the engine down and following the orders of the police. If you need further instructions, there's a good video from an esteemed self-preservation expert named Chris Rock, who explains the details, look it up. Trying to run over police officers is not a good recipe for self-preservation.
A human can - and will be - blamed, and shot - for trying to achieve their desires by means of murdering other humans. Not "wanting" to be arrested is fine, trying to avoid being arrested by attacking a police officer with deadly force is very bad for your future life expectancy.
Stop watching videos of people being stupid. It is not good for you, as instead of intended effect - pointing at them, laughing and saying "that would teach me to never do that!" - you seem to arrive at the opposite conclusion - "resisting arrest is what everybody should do". Don't do that, it is bad for you. Even if you do not get shot, you certainly will not get any sympathy from the police and the court for that. Unless, of course, it is politically convenient for Democrats, then you'll get plenty. But it could be posthumously, so I do not recommend that at all.
If you don't do the crime, you don't do the time. If you do not want to be arrested, do not mess with police officers on duty.
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