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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.
Had the ICE officer not moved left, the path the vehicle took definitely would have hit him.
https://imgur.com/a/1k6ljs9
If you watch the video, he's moving from the right to the left, so he was in the way of the vehicle in the seconds before the car started moving.
Here's what I can see happened from the different videos.
ICE Officer A (the officer that fired the shot) is filming the vehicle of the woman and moves in from the right side of the vehicle to the front of the vehicle. ICE Officer B approaches the vehicle from the left saying "get out of the car" multiple times and as soon as he reaches the car attempts to open the door.
Going frame by frame, the wheels start to move before the officer's hand tries to open the door, but not before the officer raises his hand at towards her.
The car reverses a bit and stops. While this is happening, ICE officer A is in front of the vehicle moving from the right to the left. It's possible the woman's attention is solely focused on ICE Officer B and may not even be aware ICE officer A is in front of her, possibly inattentional blindness.
The instant the car attempts to move forward Ice Officer A pulls out the card and shoots. The time between when the wheel starts to move forward and when he tries to pull the gun out is about 8 frames (going frame by frame on the linked youtube video for angle 2), and since the video is playing at 30 frames per seconds, that is about 266 milliseconds.
So based on what I can see this is what I conclude.
The woman was there to be disruptive to ICE. As soon as ICE shows up and confronts her, she panics and tries to run away. I don't think she was intending to run someone over and it's possible the ICE Officer standing in front of her vehicle wasn't registering in her mind, or the path the ICE officer took walking from right to left in front of her vehicle made her think he would keep moving left out of the way of the vehicle. Perhaps she thought a path was opening up and in a moment of panic was looking for a way to get out as soon as possible. (Which by the way, is an extremely stupid thing to do. Even if you are in the right and an officer is harassing you, trying to run away is one of the worst responses you can do other than physically attacking the officer. In this situation, even if unintentionally, attempting to run away also cause the possibility of physical harm to an officer. The behavior of the type of people to run and resist police might be interesting to dig further into but likely has already been discussed heavily here in the Motte already and this is already going too far off-topic from the point I want to make so I shall abstain from commenting further for now.)
Regardless, when she decides to try to move the vehicle forward, he is very clearly standing in a spot where the vehicle would hit him. 266 milliseconds from when the car starts to move forward to when he starts to pull the gun out is well within standard human reaction time. There's about 36-38 frames from when he begins to pull the gun out to when smoke appears from the gun. I think it is within possibility that the moment he detected the car driving towards him the ICE officer felt his life threatened and used his gun as a response, and not that he was waiting for an opportunity to shoot someone. If he had been pulling the gun out sooner, I think the arguments that he was looking for an opportunity to shoot someone would be stronger, but here that is not the case.
I don't think a lot of people understand how dangerous vehicles are due to being around cars all the time. Due to their size, even at a small speed it can do significant damage to the human body. For example, if you had a 4500 lb SUV accelerate from 0 to 5 mph in 1 second that's approximately 10,000 N of force. For comparison, a punch from an elite level boxer would be around 5000 N of force. From what I saw in the video, I don't think the vehicle would've killed the officer if it hit him, but it could've done significant physical damage if he didn't move out of the way. If a guy was running towards an officer trying to punch him and got shot, it would be very hard to defend that. A vehicle accelerating to even 5mph when it would hit someone possesses way more power behind it. Intentional or not, that was the level of physical force that could've hit that officer. Driving a car is an insane privilege with great potential for damage that I think a lot of people simply don't respect.
EDIT: There is a 4th angle video that makes it clearer what happened.
Officer A went to the car in front of the woman's car with the door open (perhaps to grab something or check something on the system), then he turns around and starts moving towards the woman's car, but he is NOT in front of the car. When she begins moving backwards, that positions the car to be angled towards him. Officer A stops his walk. The charitable take for the officer is that this triggers his memory of being run over previously, and he enters a fight response, causing him to pull out his firearm and shoot. It's important to note that the decision for the women to reverse and for the officer to shoot happens in a matter of seconds.
I think this makes it clear several things
The woman did not purposefully attempt to run over an officer when she made her decision to back the vehicle up. It's very likely her attention was focused on Officer B that grabbed her vehicle's door and in fact Officer A was clearly not in front of the vehicle when she begins backing up.
Officer A did not deliberately position himself in front of the car to block the vehicle from moving. It just so happened that the vehicle began moving backward while he was moving towards the car. If we go frame by frame and look at where he stopped moving relative to the direction the car was facing before it began backing up, he would not have been in the path of the car had it moved straight forward instead of backing up first. So my initial assessment that he was walking right from left in front of the vehicle was completely wrong.
What pisses me off is that on Twitter and Youtube and Discord the culture war warriors are arguing over the demonstratable facts of the case rather than the interpretation of the events. Everyone has the same access to the videos I do and linking the exact same video I watched and yet they seem to have missed key details entirely and then forming their entire opinion and analysis based on it. The "analysis" videos are even worse, I saw one circle the random pedestrian (not the officer) and add an arrow to officer B (but no highlighting of Officer A) and now people on Twitter are sharing that video as proof that the Officer A was not in front of the car. Or the screenshot of the officer shooting at the car but not the frame before showing that the car would've hit the officer. Are the people liking and sharing this dishonest evaluation, not watching the video? Are they mentally blocking any information that would provide evidence towards the conclusion they don't like, and only looking for the conclusion they would like?
This is nothing new, of course. There were people that believed Rittenhouse shot a black person even though the video evidence was available even before the trials. But you cannot even have a proper conversation when the core facts of the situation is in dispute and one side refuses to acknowledge the reality of what happened. You can have an argument about who is in fault here (is shooting the right response or a reasonable response, do you deserve to be shot if you're running away in a vehicle and in the process put someone in harm's way), you cannot have an argument with someone that believes that the officer was trying to block the vehicle with his body or that the vehicle was never pointing towards the officer because the fundamental assumptions of their argument is completely false.
Yep.
Although it's rough to watch, you can check out videos of things like "trailer hitch fails" to see just how dangerous a "slow moving" SUV / truck can be. Knees folding like car tables, multiple surgeries type of things.
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I think your analysis of the mechanics is fair, but doesn’t solve the issue.
The driver seems to be trying to leave, not run down an officer. He’s crossing in front of the car and nearly out of the way, and yet as soon as the car shifts to forward he has his gun out and is shooting.
If a car begins accelerating towards you and your split second reaction is to go for your gun, I’m questioning your motives. The fact that a car is dangerous isn’t relevant, because it’s not clear he was fearing for his life!
Suppose for a minute an officer is directing traffic. He looks over, and sees a driver, texting, heading in his direction. To shoot in that scenario, instead of moving out of the way, would be deranged. The only reason it’s being defended here, as I see it, is because the driver is disobeying ICE orders.
The ICE agent was very clearly standing in a spot where the vehicle could not move forward without hitting him. You yourself agree with this assessment ("I think your analysis of the mechanics is fair, but doesn’t solve the issue."). How can you possibly determine the intention of her actions by what her actions were ? In both cases the results of either action would be exactly the same, she can't leave without hitting him. Trying to run down the officer looks exactly like trying to escape when the officer is a foot in front of your car!
She follows them around, gets ahead of them, parks in the street, waits for them to get out, waits until a guy is right in front of her, then hits the gas. That doesn't seem at all like she was trying to leave.
"Ah yes, you can see the woman has pure motives, she was just trying to leave, I can tell my a frame by frame analysis of her tire movements. But ICE agent, he reached for his gun while he was a foot in front of accelerated into him, that's suspicious!"
The dangerousness of a car hitting a person is irrelevant to that persons fear for their life? Really?
Unfortunately this is where we get to both repeat different versions of the narrative at each other, even in the face of multiple video angles.
She reversed initially, basically doing a shallow 3-point turn, as he was crossing in front of the car. It seems almost certain to me that she was not trying to run over the agent, she likely didn’t know he was there. Not only that, but the agent was out of the way, or trivially able to move out of the way. (He was not significantly struck by the vehicle, although the exact mechanics are messy because he stumbles a bit on the side.) Why pull a gun there?
To say she “waits until a guy is right in front of her, then hits the gas” is to imply she was actively trying to kill him, instead of being careless. It’s also just not accurate!
I think there’s an extremely strong case that it was clear she was not attempting to kill the agent, and that he would have known that, and that his reaction was comically incompetent. I would speculate he was frustrated, aggressive, and panicked, and turned what was at worst reckless endangerment into an execution.
Even granting we are reading different narratives, I just don't see a difference between "I intentionally tried to run this guy over" and "I was trying to escape law enforcement and in my escape I was so negligent in my driving that I hit a man directly in front of my windshield"
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I basically agree with your analysis. Regardless of her intent, she was at a minimum engaged in reckless driving.
Possibly if she'd been driving at Kyle Rittenhouse, he would have handled the situation better but it looks to me like the officer's behavior was within the standards of what is reasonable.
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