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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.
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.
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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