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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.
The claim that the victim was trying to run an agent over is not only not true, video footage clearly shows that it isn't. That won't stop DHS from lying (again) and claiming that ICE agents were victims instead of perpetrators (again). It's thoroughly unclear why they were trying to stop this woman in the first place, and given ICE's pattern of lying, I have zero confidence in their testimony (see also: Chicago)
The slippery slope here is one we've already slid down: "law enforcement needs certain authority to do their job" has become "law enforcement can do whatever they want if it's allegedly part of their job and it's a spin of the roulette wheel whether they'll ever face consequences." The best you can realistically hope for is an order telling them to stop violating your rights, which is of limited utility when you're dead. Maybe you'll get lucky and there will be earth-shattering protests, but more likely the taxpayers will get stuck footing the bill while nothing of consequence results for the actual perpetrators.
The legality of the shoot is not dependant on "did she intend to run him over", it's "did he reasonably think she was trying to run him over." Two very different things.
The legal question is regrettably rather immaterial. The odds that a federal agent is going to be held accountable by the current (or any) administration is quite low, and doubly so for Steven Miller's specialest boys. However, Noem is currently asserting not merely that the shooting was legally justified but that the victim was actually a domestic terrorist attempting to murder ICE agents, which is very obviously false.
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