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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.
The car drives in reverse as the ICE agent walks toward her door from the front of the car. It abruptly stops in reverse with its tires faced in the exact direction to hit this ICE agent. If the last moment of “stopped with angle of hitting agent” is set to 0 seconds and 0 milliseconds, there is 1 second and 5 milliseconds before the shot is fired. Within this 1 second, the driver changes the angle of the tires as they begin to accelerate, which narrowly prevents the officer from being run over by the driver. Cold, fatigued, and stressed, the officer has all of these concerns within a single second:
• Do they have a weapon? His eyes need to be on the driver through the windshield, because ICE agents have previously been shot and weapons have previously been brandished. This is normal policing: you take out your weapon when someone belligerently refuses to listen to orders.
• Do I have my weapon out and ready? He needs to get his weapon out and aim toward the driver in case she has a weapon, which is normal police work.
• Is she going to hit me? It looks like she is, but my attention is not on the split-second angle turn of her tire, but on whether she has a weapon.
The shot appears to be fired just as the officer is hit by the side of the vehicle, though the officer probably had no idea that the driver intended to swerve out of the way in the last milliseconds so that it would simply brush against him, rather than giving him life-altering injuries which he doesn’t deserve (like paralysis). A reasonable person would infer that an accelerating driver with its tires angled toward you, and who sees you, is not going to serve away right at the exact moment to avoid life-altering injuries. If this inference is correct, then we are not discussing whether lethal force is justified over a trivial injury but over a serious injury or death.
IMHO we are left with these possibilities:
Never allow police to stand in front of a vehicle. I have no idea what the discussion on this would look like. If standing in front of a vehicle is helpful in determining whether a driver is reaching for a weapon, then this would be a complicated determination.
Tell police to do a barrel roll away as soon as they see a car beginning to move in any direction. I guess they can do that. But that interferes with safety per above. This officer could have jumped out of the way when she reversed, but did he know that she was about to accelerate toward him? This would require a change in policing strategy, so it can’t be blamed on this sole officer but the whole of society who elects lawmakers and so forth.
Require police to accept probable but not certain life-altering injuries in their line of work. This seems unreasonable and unethical.
Tell people to obey orders and not accelerate toward a human being in front of them.
Someone might say, “were I the officer I would have used my split second reaction time to get out of the way”. But for you, this event would put you in a hyper-vigilant and high adrenaline state of heightened attention. For the officer, this is simply one of the 40 hours of monotonous work that he must do every day. You can’t compare your state to his; you should compare his state to the periods of low or moderate attention that you sustain in your own occupational hours.
Let's say he thought she was going to hit him. Why does that mean he should have shot her? It didn't prevent him from being hit. It couldn't have unless he did it before she started moving, but surely you're not saying he can pre-emptively shoot her in case she starts driving towards him. The argument seems to be that, once she started driving towards him, then he was sufficiently threatened that he was justified in shooting her. But at that point, it is not at all reasonable to think shooting her can prevent her from shooting him.
So that just leaves the possibility that she has a weapon. But at no point did he have any reason to suspect that she did have a weapon. He only thought she might because anyone might. And doesn't it become much less likely that she is going to shoot him once she's driving? Now he's a moving target and she is a vehicle to operate while shooting him. It seems very unlikely. If he can shoot her in this scenario, he can shoot anyone disobeying police orders.
And why the time constraint apply here? He has one second until what, exactly? Until the car reaches him. But that is how much time he has to decide whether to shoot her to prevent her from hitting him with the car. It doesn't apply to the weapon concern. You don't just immediately shoot every non-cooperative person because you have time to determine whether he's armed.
For either concern, why is he standing in front of the car? Why is he standing in front of a moving car if he's worried she'll him? Why is he standing front of someone who might have a gun?
So the police officer solves this by creating a situation where he's likely to have to kill her because he isn't going to immediately find out whether she's armed. You said he drew his weapon because she wasn't co-operative. If she isn't co-operative, why not expect that she'll drive away? Why isn't this far more likely than that she's armed?
The trade off here just doesn't make any sense. The police officer is deciding to do something that will probably result in him killing her to gain the slightest bit of information about the probability of her having gun.
Even if we're only concerned about the police officer's safety, why is the supposedly substantial risk he gets run over by the car worth the tiny risk that she's going to shoot him and he's going to prevent that by getting in front of her and getting a better look at her?
I think he probably did know, because he made no attempt to get out of the way. It's possible he just had bad judgment and thought the right move to being run over by a large SUV was to shoot the driver when it was already in motion, but I think it's more likely he noticed it turning and understood he had time to get out of the way. He's actually leaning to his left and the moment he fires his first shot, seemingly to maintain his line of sight so that he could shoot her.
I think the solution to this is simple. No, don't stand in front of vehicles, especially if you think they might try to run you over, and definitely don't try to shoot someone if they do try to drive towards you. Just get out of the way.
OK, but he needs to be trained for this. If his instinct is to draw his gun and he doesn't have sufficient training to know what to do once his gun is drawn, that's a serious problem. The two key decisions he made which he should have consciously avoided if he didn't think he was mentally prepared for this situation were positioning himself in front of the vehicle of a non-cooperating suspect and drawing his gun. Maybe the split second decision once in that situation is tough, but then don't put yourself in that situation.
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Having seen the videos, I will say the following:
Shooting her was utterly ineffective at saving the agent's life, because it did not stop her car from going forward.
It appears that there was more than one agent around. My understanding is that police tactics generally involve teamwork. There is no reason that one agent should be tasked with blocking her escape path, watching out for weapons etc.
I think that you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic less likely to shoot a person than middle-aged urban white women. Also, if a cop feel that is a threat, they should already be brandishing your weapon before they see the suspect drawing his, they are not a cowboy in the Old West who needs to rely on his ability to draw faster than his opponent so that he can claim self defense.
Standing in the pathway of a suspect's car to impede their escape is plain stupid. This is the reason why for example the CBP has explicit rules which say "don't do that".
I see the events as a tragic tale of two fuckwits. Fuckwit A decided to play #LaResistance by using her car to impede ICE in an unlawful manner, then panicked when it became apparent that she would get arrested for he trouble, and in her panic recklessly endangered an ICE agent.
Fuckwit B, having previously been hit by a car driven by another suspect in the line of duty, decided it would be a great idea to again stand in the path of a suspect's car, thereby turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon. Rather than brandishing his weapon and making his threat explicit, he waited for her to move the car forward. At that point, he drew his gun and shot her, an act which would not have saved him if she had aimed for him. By the time he fired his shots, he was already out of danger.
If one fuckwit kills another while both are engaging in fuckwittery, it is customary to charge the surviving one with manslaughter. If A had killed B by ramming him with her car, we definitely should be charging her (and her defense would try to make the point that only an idiot would stand in the path of a panicking suspect). Here, B's defense will make the valid point that only an idiot will panic and try to recklessly escape when about to be arrested for a petty crime.
What are you talking about? An officer is not supposed to just "brandish his weapon" at someone sitting in a stopped car. There are rules about that. Likewise, where do you think an officer is supposed to stand relative to a stopped car? You're not supposed to make it easier for someone to escape in case they decide to use lethal force. There are rules about that.
You're calling the guy a "fuckwit" (cringe) for following standard police protocols.
So standard police procedures are to stand in front of a car, relying on your quickdraw skills to be able to shoot the driver if she starts to accelerate towards you before get run over (which would empirically not prevent you from getting run over -- if she had aimed for him as he had aimed for her, then he would be lucky to be in a wheelchair)? Do you have any citation to back that up?
I have already quoted the CBP guidelines about "do not block the path of a vehicle with your body" elsewhere in this discussion. I see this as clear evidence that the shooters behavior is not "standard police protocols". If you want to argue that for ICE it is, please provide evidence.
Your idea seems to be that the ICE officer is a “fuckwit” for not actively aiming his gun at a woman in a stopped car. Your very strong opinion that he should not have been in front of the car is based on very ambiguous video evidence, nobody can even agree if he was in front of or to the side of her car before she turned her wheels. And now you want citations to prove that cops don’t wave their guns around at civilians and can’t walk in front of a parked car.
This is very stupid. I’m not sure there’s a nicer word. You would be better off arguing that the ICE officer should have exercised magically perfect split-second decision making. Because what you are actually suggesting is that the ICE officer shouldn’t have shot her, he should have just aimed his gun at her. Actually I don’t need a citation to know that’s not how cops work.
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I think you are, actually. For good reason. You're putting your life in the driver's hands in the hopes he doesn't call your bluff and just run you over. If the priority is officer safety, how is this a good move?
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It shouldn’t matter if shooting her was ineffective at preventing the hit, because if there is even the tiniest chance that shooting mitigates serious injury, then it is rational and moral. The person receiving the unjust serious injury has every right and reason to prevent as much of it as he can; it is the aggressor who forfeits their claim to life. The chance of being stuck on the front of her car until she crashes or runs you over is slightly lower if you shoot her.
You can’t profile this woman as the average member of the general class of women, because she belongs to a very small class of people trying to illegally impede the law. I imagine those who go out of their way to impede ICE have a much higher risk of carrying a weapon.
I think that your concept of "lawbreaker woman", which includes Ulrike Meinhof, Bonnie Parker and Renee Good, does not really carve reality at its joints.
While Good was engaged in illegal activity intended to impede ICE, it is notable that her planned way of impeding them was non-violent. Anyone willing to murder a few ICE agents in the process of impeding their progress would not waste their time on non-violent resistance. Anyone planning at shooting ICE will likely not engineer a situation where their car is surrounded by ICE agents as a starting point.
I will grant you that there is a tiny probability that contrary to tribal (and gender) cultural norms, she was a gun enthusiast and a crack shot, and had also stupidly taken her pistol along 'for self defense' on her non-violent resistance, and would in a panic try to shoot her way out of getting arrested.
But realistically, the probability of her starting to shoot was still lower than for a 20yo white dude at a routine traffic stop.
It seems intuitive to me that a woman who goes out of her way to impede the law and disobey orders is going to be more likely to resist arrest violently, whether with a firearm or a blade or a car. The average woman would not do this, thus you can’t place her in the population of average woman, any more than the average Jan 6 protester is not representative of the average population of Trump voters. The small segment of the female population who would do this is radicalized, which is a small sliver of the female population, like 0.001% of them. A woman who believes that ICE is so evil that you must illegally stop them and then evade them is simply going to be more likely to commit violence against them than the general population of women. This is a filtered, or “preselected”, radical population, in a climate where the news is constantly radicalizing people and where death threats have previously been made.
The officers did not / would not know that. She could easily be luring them to the vehicle, which is common tactic in anti-police violence.
Disagree per above, and also because the violent do not behave rationally. Irrationally and violence go hand in hand.
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Not to address anything else in your post, but I will say that a lot of people, especially blue-tribers, claim that brandishing a weapon is an automatic escalation (see all the accusations of how Rittenhouse was provoking people by being armed).
I am sure the blue-tribers say that. Personally, I would prefer to have a gun brandished toward me or even trained at me by a cop 20 times to being shot without warning even once.
If someone is standing in front of a vehicle wants to signal "I will treat you moving forward at any angle as a deadly assault and blow your brains out", then I would very much prefer that threat to be made explicitly.
Not letting suspects know when they are one sudden movement away from getting shot will greatly reduce stress for the median case, but it will also result in unfortunate failures of communication when they try to get their papers from their glove compartment a little too fast.
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+1 for constant profiling by law enforcement. I am not being sarcastic.
Again, this falls into the trap of "why didn't the cop just have 100% perfect awareness of the entire situation, perfect emotional control, and ninja like reflexes!"
When someone fails to obey repeated police commands, police have to default to treating them as hostile. When that same person them, immediately and without hesitation, engages in dangerous behavior, lethal force is now on the table. When all of this happens within ~ 5 seconds, it's just a dice roll of who ends up injured or dead.
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I do not see how drilling officers to shoot at the driver of a car which is coming at them and is within feet of them is supposed to help them not get hit by the car.
If drivers knew they'd get shot and killed for driving into armed cops, they'd probably do it less.
People already know you can’t run over a cop. This does nothing against panic.
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He could also have shot to wound (or indeed intimidate) rather than shot to kill.
Which being said, I'm very sympathetic to the "split-second fight-or-flight" circumstances and I don't think he should go to jail about it or anything, any engagement I have in this debate is at the level of "how to make sure fewer things like this happen in the future", not "here is why that particular cop is an evil monster and no reasonable person would have acted as he did".
Tasers and pepper spray (which are "shooting to wound"- you can't realistically use any firearm like this) won't go through a windshield or sheet metal.
Once she hit the gas, the gun was the only option.
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This is a stupid Hollywood meme, like silencers (which are in the real world used to protect your hearing, but get banned because normies watching movies think they literally make guns silent). Nobody in the firearms community teaches that, for multiple reasons:
I am not talking about what is legal, easiest or fastest, I am talking about what is most ethical. Nor do I imagine that there is some magic way to shoot someone while being sure that it won't kill them - but a successful headshot is guaranteed to be fatal, while torso or limbs is only possibly so. I would consider it more ethical to trade a slightly higher chance of missing for a distinctly lower chance that you will have rashly destroyed the life a human being.
Ethics means nothing if it's not achievable in practice. It's not merely that it's easiest to hit the center of mass, it's that missing (or hitting an anatomically insignificant region) does not end the threat and at best, wastes your time and ammo, and at worst, results in your death. You should also not be so quick to dismiss the legalities because if something is supposedly ethical but illegal then no one is going to do it.
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This is stereotypically the response of someone who knows absolutely nothing about firearms, violent encounters, the law around use of force or really anything at all relevant to a police shooting. It is so perfectly wrong that it delegitimizes anything else a person might say about the subject. It misunderstands the law, the morality around use of force, the physical capabilities of small arms and the reasonable limits of police training.
See my reply here. I am aware that this would be harder, and by no means guarantee the target's survival. It would, however, be more ethical, because human life is the most precious thing in the universe, and in my book you need a very high level of confidence that your own life in immediate peril before you are morally justified in taking someone else's. If he wasn't certain that Good was trying to run him over (and he couldn't be) then it would in some important sense have been fairer for him to resort to a means of incapacitating her that had less than 100% chances of being fatal if successfully executed. (Endangering her life to protect his own, i.e. shooting her in such a way that she may very well die, but which is not intended to kill her, comes with a much lower threshold.) The moral thing to do is not necessarily the easiest, fastest, nor most conducive to one's own safety.
I say again, though, that I'm talking about what a perfect actor "should" have done in an ideal frictionless-spherical-cows world, a world in which things like "the reasonable limits of police training" (and human fallibility in general) have no purchase. In the real world, as I said in the post you're replying to, I in no way blame the cop for having acted the way he did.
The stereotypes were correct.
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This is, as far as I know, generally not legal in the US. Either there is danger to life and limb justifying legal, lethal-intent force, or there is not: it's quite binary, and there's no "well, there was enough danger to justify roughing them up a little" middle ground for good reasons. Indeed, even "warning shots" are generally frowned upon.
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Shooting to wound is not a thing.
I've seen patients come in with over 10 holes and be fine.
I've seen patients get a superficial seeming abdominal or leg wound and bleed out.
Any gunshot wound is potentially fatal, even "less than lethal" weapons like tasers are potentially lethal. That's why we use the euphemistic language.
If any self-defense or law enforcement group advocates for "shoot to maim" I'd love to see it.
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No, he could not, and you suggesting this demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of both the mechanics and the legalities of employing firearms in self-defense.
"Shooting to wound" or "shooting to disable" is not a technique law enforcement officers are taught, because it is, to a first approximation, not a real thing. Self-defense shooting training universally focuses on firing center of mass and as rapidly as possible, because this is by far the best, safest and most effective way to shoot in a self-defense scenario. The next-best target is the head. Limbs move around a lot more than bodies and heads, hitting them is not "non-lethal" by any reasonable definition due to the arteries involved, and missed shots can easily continue on to strike bystanders behind the target.
"Firing to intimidate", "warning shots" and so on are, to my knowledge, flatly illegal in all jurisdictions. Firearms are lethal weapons, and to legitimately discharge a firearm in self-defense requires you to believe you are beyond the point of warnings. Law Enforcement Officers give warnings by shouting them, not by discharging firearms.
In this specific case, the officer firing through the windshield was presented with a target consisting of the driver's upper torso and head, at close range and on minimal timing. The doctrine-correct response is to aim for center-of-mass or the head.
If you want fewer things like this to happen in the future, the obvious way would be for Blue Tribe to stop demonizing legitimate law enforcement and those conducting it, for Blue Tribers to stop attempting to disrupt legitimate law-enforcement operations, for Blue Tribe to create general knowledge that attempting to interfere in legitimate law enforcement operations by driving an SUV into the middle of them is not a good idea, and finally for Blue Tribe to internalize that if you are being ordered out of your car by officers of the law approaching on foot, the proper response is not to put your vehicle in drive and attempt to drive away.
It is obvious that Blues here and in the public at large desperately want this to be Law Enforcement's fault, but in fact the officers made zero observable mistakes, and the "protester" did everything wrong. She participated in a mob attempting to disrupt law enforcement. She blocked the road with her vehicle. She refused to comply with lawful orders. She attempted to drive away, struck an officer in the process, and in the process of this was shot dead. Every one of those actions was a profoundly stupid choice. Make enough stupid choices in sequence, and it is easy to get dead. The solution is not to provide additional protections to people making stupid choices, it is to teach people not to make stupid choices.
This isn't as universal as you make it sound. In Germany, and to my knowledge other european countries as well, police are taught to shoot for warning, at the leg or at tires, so there exist competing schools at thought and differing laws.
As a matter of American tactical and legal doctrine though, which is relevant to the case in question, you are correct.
There may different schools of thought and laws, but there aren't different schools of biology. The leg is not a vestigial body part that can be safely and predictably punctured with ordinance. It may not be 'as' deadly as a shot to the chest or the head, but this is because of the order priority of critical organs, not because of a lack of critical bodily functions, i.e. arteries.
If someone competent tells you that they are shooting at the legs to warn rather than kill, they are lying to you. It may be policy to lie to you, it may be part of security theater to make the public feel better and that things aren't so dangerous, but it is at best a case of 'and trying to kill,' not 'instead of.'
But the disagreements are about tactis and laws, not biology.
Almost no violence is truly "safe". The judgment of different options on the risk-of-death/efficacy ratio is a matter of tradeoffs and cutoffs. "The risk of death in a shot to the leg is x" is biology. "The risk is so high compared to the likelihood of stopping a threat that there is no situation where it is justified over a center-of-mass shot" is not biology, and that's where the schools of though differ.
No one said that. (Edit to clarify: warning shots, shots at the legs and shots at tires are three different things. When I wrote "police are taught to shoot for warning, at the leg or at tires", the comma could be replaced with another "or".
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Bullet to the leg easily could kill you. Major vein there.
Artery. And that's how my great-great grandfather died in a hunting accident.
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From "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis:
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The police didn't do scientific studies to determine whether standing in front of a vehicle is useful for that purpose. They just say it, and everyone believes them. Given how the police like to game the system by giving undisprovable, bogus, explanations for why they do things (sure, they searched the car because they smelled marijuana), I don't grant much charity to the claim that standing in front of a vehicle is necessary.
I wouldn't say never stand in front of a vehicle. But I would say that if they do, they've deliberately escalated the lethality of the situation by putting themselves in harm's way and as such, the standard for them using lethal force should be made stricter. (And I don't believe that shooting the driver is likely to prevent being hit by the car anyway.) If you think the police should be able to shoot people for fleeing, make a law that says the police can shoot people for fleeing. Without such a law, the police shouldn't turn fleeing into a lethal confrontation just so they can shoot anyway.
And yes, this does apply to other people who block vehicles to put themselves in danger from the driver. The most prominent examples being, ironically, protestors who do so. Hurting such a protestor in the process of getting away from them should be treated leniently.
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Why were ICE agents stepping in front of a moving vehicle driven by a white woman? Hang them.
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the road also looked icy. it was extremely reckless what she was trying to do even if she didn't intend to harm the agent.
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I predict that there's maybe four people on this forum who could dodge a thrown water bottle from 10 feet away. "Just dodge the car bro" is Marvel movie thinking.
How full is the water bottle? And it's a normal person throwing it with a predictable windup or it's just magically headed directly towards my center of mass and it's a question of reflexes to get out of the way? I feel like a childhood of playing suicide (apparently called butts up in the US of A) gives me pretty good odds.
But also, without caring that much about the underlying specifics, the cop did 'just dodge the car.' He wasn't meaningfully hit. And even if he had been hit head on and still shot and killed the driver, it didn't stop the car from accelerating and crashing into the other parked car. If anything, shooting her probably made him less safe than jumping on the hood of the car or something.
Not to mention, if you shoot me in the chest or something I'm 100% going to do my best to run you over even if that wasn't my intention before.
Normal, full 20oz water bottle thrown by a reasonably fit and competent adult man. Sure, 10yo Iconochasm would have done a Suicide Slide on concrete (because dodgeball is Serious Business), but 40-something Iconochasm is lucky not too break his ankles playing basketball against teenagers. I have a lot more bulk to move around these days, and slower reaction times with which to do it. I would have much better odds of catching or deflecting such a bottle than 1. realizing what is happening, 2. anticipating where it's going, and 3. successfully moving my body from rest the 3' or so needed to clear the target area in the time it takes a thrown water bottle to travel 10'.
As a loosely related tangent, I wonder if the reason Rittenhouse was able to perform such remarkably rapid transitions between threat response and deescalation is precisely because he was a kid and had those 17yo peak gamer millisecond twitch reaction speeds. First resource I found online suggests a 10-15% drop off between the late teens and the early 40's, which is less than I thought.
Hell yeah, brother.
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As somebody who could probably dodge the water bottle and somebody who's been hit by a few cars, I wouldn't have wanted to be that ICE agent.
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If you have time to draw and shoot at the driver (which is supposed to stop the car fast enough to not hit you how, exactly?), why wouldn't you have time to get out of the way?
If the car is being deliberately driven at you, getting out of the way may be impossible. It doesn't appear that was the case here, but the officer wouldn't have known that at the time.
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