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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.
This is exactly the kind of situation I was afraid of when ICE started running amok in states where they aren't wanted. I don't see how it can be a "narrative" when we point out that the thing happened that we warned would happen. Giving a paramilitary organization the power to make people disappear without due process was always a recipe for disaster. These ICE agents now appear to be so power-drunk that they are shooting unarmed white women, something normal cops very rarely do.
From what I can see in the video, the ICE agent chose to put himself in front of the SUV to block the woman from leaving. Then she called his bluff and began driving anyway. At that point, shooting her made no difference in his ability to survive the situation. Even if she were killed instantly by a headshot, the car would still have the same amount of momentum when it hit the officer. If anything, he could have gotten out of the way faster if he weren't dealing with his gun. I don't see any justification here.
It clearly wasn’t a bluff. As I said to another poster, “you’re allowed to obstruct and then flee as long as you’re reckless about it” is not a stable status quo. “Resisting arrest and ignoring the authority of detaining officers will get you shot”, is.
Complying with the police is how you stay alive and fleeing the scene / believing your car is “base” that you are allowed to plow forward is how you get shot. I can’t comprehend how it could be any other way. It’s the very belief that you are allowed to flee that is creating these outcomes.
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.
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.
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