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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 genre of statement is the epitome of "pretending not to understand, making discourse impossible." Nobody, anywhere, has ever argued that fleeing police or resisting arrest deserve a summary execution, but a lot of anti-police types love to pretend that this is the argument being made, ignoring the fact that in practically every single police killing, with extremely few exceptions, the suspect is doing something that threatens the officer's life, and that behavior is what justifies, not a summary execution, but an act of self-defense.
When the police decide to arrest you, they are now allowed to use whatever amount of force is necessary (but not more) to get you in handcuffs and into custody. You get to decide how much force that is! I repeat, how much force is required to bring you into custody is completely up to you! You can choose to turn around, put your hands behind your back, and have no force used against you at all! It astounds me, and I am completely unable to understand why, so many people apparently believe that choosing to require more force to bring you into custody is a legitimate choice that should be given more accommodation in society.
I think this is a slight overreach. Let's take the time I ran from police IRL.
A week prior, I'd tried to kill myself with a knife. I got chucked in the looney bin, because that's what you do when someone's interrupted in a suicide attempt. I stopped being suicidal within days, but this meant I had another problem i.e. the fact that the looney bin had terrible security, and one of the other patients kept talking about how he was going to murder all the staff. I complained about the awful security, got brushed off, and successfully escaped all the way back to the house where I lived. 24 hours later, the police showed up, intending to return me; I ran, but was unable to outrun them and gave up. (After they hauled me all the way back - which was over 100km - I got released after 2 hours, because I pointed out to the psychiatrist that if I were still suicidal I'd had plenty of opportunity in the 24 hours I'd been loose; you'd think they'd have realised that without having to drag me all the way back there, but apparently boxes needed to be ticked or something.)
So, okay. Take that situation and make me a better runner, so that I could outrun the police. Is it warranted for the police to shoot me?
I'd say no, because there's literally nothing plausibly gained by doing so. I hadn't committed any crimes, or posed any threat to anyone besides myself - and shooting me would of course have put my life in much greater jeopardy than letting me escape. Assuming I was considered a suicide risk (leaving aside the reasonableness of that determination), I'd say the outcomes should be preferred in the order capture > escape > death, not capture > death > escape.
I think this extends up into some of the more minor crimes. If someone parks in a 2-hour parking zone for 3 hours, and drives away in a normal, non-dangerous fashion when an on-foot policeman approaches, I think it's not good for the policeman to pull out a gun and shoot him. Parking violations are not very serious, and the expense in money and lives of shooting the criminal (notably including innocents, because shooting the driver of a moving vehicle typically results in a crash) far exceeds the benefit of preventing him from possibly escaping justice, or even the deterrence value of getting X amount of other people to not park longer than permitted.
Certainly, for serious crimes like murder or even robbery, there's enough of a problem with a successful escape that the outcome preference should be capture > death > escape. And of course, the death or serious injury of a policeman or innocent ranks below any of these. But yeah, I'd call this sentence a bit stronger than warranted.
EDIT: Realised this was non-obvious, so: I was running into a public forest, hence "follow in car until exhausted" wouldn't have worked.
"We should look to interactions with the mentally unwell as a gauge for our evaluation of police conduct" is a hell of an argument.
And then an explicit recommendation against due process. Huh.
No one is making this argument. Not even implicitly. This is strawman and conflation dialed up to 10.
No? I said that capture (for trial) is better than death, and it's usually feasible.
StableOutlook made a very sweeping statement that we seem to agree was not literally true in all cases. I pulled him up on it. You don't want me to point out where there need to be asterisks, add the asterisks, or even an IOU for asterisks like "(mostly)", yourself.
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No, and zero people are arguing for this, and zero law enforcement organizations allow this. This is peak strawman.
This lady in Minneapolis wasn't shot for trying to escape. She got shot because she struck a police officer with her car. This is assault with a deadly weapon. Every single person in all 50 states is permitted to use lethal force to resist an assault with a deadly weapon. Including people who aren't police officers. Pretending that she was shot for merely escaping is also peak strawman.
I did no such thing. You made a broad statement that covered much-less-defensible cases, and I pulled you up on overbreadth (which I even called "slight"), while clarifying that serious injury of a policeman warrants deadly force.
/u/StableOutshoot said:
I don't see anything overbroad or less defensible here. Being charitable, I'm guessing you have a legitimate confusion as to what "necessary" means. The answer is that, per Tennessee v. Garner, they are not allowed to use deadly force against a fleeing suspect unless the suspect is a deadly threat to others. If they were to shoot a nonviolent suspect who posed no threat (like they did to Garner), that force would be considered unnecessary.
Do you still think /u/StableOutshoot's statement is an overreach?
No, I was just reading the word "whatever" literally. If you would escape if not shot dead, "whatever amount of force is necessary [...] to get you in handcuffs and into custody" is by construction "shoot you, and then handcuff the corpse".
I was reading that sentence as speaking normatively, as it was responding to a pair of normative statements*; you seem to be reading it descriptively. Normatively, it's objectionably bloodthirsty, which is why (as you say) it's descriptively false in most (all?) of the Western world (for the record, I'm Australian).
The word "whatever" is a very strong word, and frequently produces overbroad statements if used without qualification (a relevant qualification in this case would have been "sublethal"). It appears that @StableOutshoot did not intend to say what he said, and he has implicitly retracted it, resolving the issue.
*Notably, one of these was "fleeing police shouldn't be a death sentence"; hence, the escape scenario was already under discussion and I assumed he meant to address it.
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