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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.
A lot of disingenuousness around this. Yes, cars move. There is literally no way to move a car other than to "accelerate" it. The car in question went from stationary, to moving - it might have even hit 7 mph. A stationary car will also "accelerate" "at you" if you stand in front of it when it starts.
The point is that if you're a cop and someone starts driving their car at you at close range while you're trying to arrest them it's very reasonable to assume they might be trying to run you over, and that is a textbook deadly threat that warrants deadly force in response.
Yes, and you should not do these things when there is a cop (or anybody else) standing right in front of your car because you could kill them.
I find this attempt to lawyer the fine points of what happened to ultimately justify it wrong headed. It was wrong before it started, this situation should have never happened in the first place and desperately trying to rules lawyer down to the second obfuscates that. There are so many dangerous incompetences and failures of legitimate governances and good police work from the start, that are not remotely justified. That said:
No. Again, you try to hide from the fact that a car went to stationary to pulling out (after ICE decided to randomly start assaulting the woman). That's not fast, and it's in fact it's texbook running away from a high pressure situation (which ICE caused) because you're scared. If he didn't sidestep, he was at risk of maybe getting his foot run over and breaking it or getting a bruise on his side. If you reeeealy stretch maybe she could have actually killed him by getting him pinned over the wheel and drive over him repeatedly. I do think if a parked car started in front of you and started pulling out your adrenaline would spike (this is probably key), but I don't think it's all that super dangerous or hard to sidestep, which is what he did.
And no, it does not "warrant deadly force." Why would shooting a car help, if you thought it was coming right for you? It might work, but it might make the situation worse. Unless the car is far away from you and you can dodge it easily anyway, look a movie showdown, shooting a car to kill is objectively the wrong thing to do. You shoot someone in a car you don't want to get away or to have vengeance on, not to control and stop a car. The best you can say is that the ICE agent was stupid and didn't think in the split second. But it's not the right response for self defense pragmatically, let alone morally justified.
""""Cops"""" should not be able to create I-get-to-murder-for-free situations for anyone they don't like in a car, where they get to declare a car a "lethal weapon" in a non falsifiable blanket statement. A car is actually rarely a deadly weapon. And there should be expectation and standards of behavior and bravery for cops. Being hyped, jumpy, or feeling subjectively scared is not the same as being actually dangerously threatened (which is different than being threatened unilaterally in a situation you can do nothing about and didn't cause). People that can't handle that or tell the difference shouldn't have been allowed to touch a gun or be given the imperium of the state monopoly on violence, especially against citizens.
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