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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.
I had to have a bit of a think about this. Cops standing in front of vehicles as a means to prevent escape then escalating to deadly force has also felt a little off to me but I was not totally clear on why. I think what icks me about it is that, as a tactic, it manufactures a justification to escalate to deadly force to prevent an escape where one would not otherwise be present.
Consider a few cases.
Imagine if the individual in the video was not in a car but rather on foot or on a bicycle. As agents approach to effect an arrest they flee. Would the police have had a legal justification to shoot them to prevent them from fleeing? My impression is no, they would not.
Imagine the individual is in a car, but they effect their escape while police are still several feet away, to the sides or rear of the vehicle. Would the police have had a legal justification to shoot them to prevent them from fleeing? My impression again is no, they would not.
But once you place an office in the direction of the vehicle's escape that escape becomes assault with a deadly weapon, which does permit escalation to lethal force.
It's obvious why officers like it as a tactic. Most people are probably not willing to make contact with a person with their vehicle to flee a crime, so it effectively prevents the obvious way someone might escape. If they are wrong about that individual's willingness it lets them escalate to shooting.
I continue to have mixed feelings about it. I don't like it as a means of manufacturing an excuse to use deadly force where you wouldn't normally be able to but it is not clear to me what reform of it as a tactic would look like.
As to this particular case I think it is unlikely the office gets convicted of a crime. I don't recall particular cases but I'm reasonably confident I've seen cases where officers used deadly force when under less threat and get acquitted. The high profile nature of the case may alter that, though.
ETA:
Someone in the comments on one of the videos posted this slowed down version and now I am less sure. It looks to me like the agent in front of the vehicle (who did the shooting) might be clear of the front of the vehicle before they open fire. High potential to be another McGlockton where what happened in a second or two of time is determinative.
ETA 2:
Slowing down Angle 3 to 1/4 speed and watching from seconds 2-4 it seems clearer to me the agent was out of danger before they opened fire.
ETA 3:
I guess I'm closer to 100% probability that this guy doesn't get convicted. Not because I think it's a good shoot but because someone pointed out that, as a federal officer, state likely can't prosecute and very unlikely the federal government prosecutes. Pending a change in administration I think it's very unlikely there are legal consequences for this guy.
The answer to all of your concerns is that nobody has a right to flee from the police.
People seem to be under the impression that because the law is a set of rules, and police in particular have rules that restrict how they are allowed to enforce the law, that the whole thing is like a sport or a game, where the point of the rules is to make the game fair for the players.
So of course they see the situation where a criminal is confronted by the police, and they think, how do I make it fair, so that the criminal has a chance to win the game? It's not fair if the police have too many advantages!
This is wrong. The law is written down so that everyone knows what is legal and how they can avoid committing crimes. Limitations on the police exist so that people are not unduly harassed by police unless they are sincerely suspected of a crime. None of these things exist to make things "fair" for criminals, they exist to preserve liberty for non-criminals.
The driver of the car was the one who escalated to deadly force here.
The other very strange thing that keeps happening in police use of force discussions is the inability of the anti-police side to ever ascribe any sort of agency to anyone other than the officers. The police officer escalated the situation by... standing there! He escalated it by... drawing his firearm after the driver had already started accelerating toward him! Never any room for the possibility that the driver would still be alive if she had made any of dozens of decisions leading up to that moment any differently, starting with deciding to drive from Missouri to Minnesota to harass federal law enforcement.
Correct, but irrelevant.
Correct, but irrelevant.
The only relevant question is 'did the shooter satisfy the conditions for self defence?' this seems very marginal. The fact alone that the officer fired through a side window while not in imminent danger is going to make things extremely difficult for him if this ever goes to court.
Every still image I've seen pretty clearly shows a bullet hole in the front windshield. Close to the edge of the front, roughly where state registration tags usually go, but still the front. I'm sure some shots went through the side considering like 4 rounds were fired, but characterizing them all as being shot from the side does not seem fair.
Not an intentional characterization. The first shot indeed went through the front window. It's the subsequent shots that I think will be very difficult to justify as self defense. I know that there is a norm that cops 'mag dump' into suspects, which they then justify with the phrase 'I fired until the threat was eliminated' - which is the legal standard.
Problem is, that justification makes sense if you're talking about a guy who just pulled a gun or charged at you. It makes way less sense if the threat was a car, and you've just dodged out of the way of that car to the extent that subsequent shots then go through the side window. What is the justification for those subsequent shots? The shooter was no longer in danger. I really think those are going to be a major issue for the shooter, legally.
Particularly if it turns out that the first shot was non-fatal -- which actually seems kind of likely given the location of the hole + quickdraw; he might not have even hit her at all there.
If he doesn't exactly have self-defence for the shots through the window, this would leave him only with defense of others/the public -- which might fly for a normal cop in this situation with a normal (here meaning crazed out of his mind on liquor and drugs) fleeing suspect; preventing a dangerous high-speed chase, heat of the moment, etc.
In this case that seems like kind of a tough row to hoe.
No. Once you establish the first shot is reasonable, the other shots within a second are also reasonable. It is a very fluid situation and LEO cannot be expected to assess within less than a second whether the threat has passed once they fire. If it was say 30 seconds later, sure. But asking them to within half a second continue to make these decisions is asking LEO to be superhuman.
Like shaken says, this is normally pretty ironclad because normally they are defending themselves from a guy with a gun etc who is hard to cross-off as a threat -- so continuing to shoot if he drops the gun or something isn't too bad.
This time, the car was clearly past him, and he had to actively turn his body to get the shot -- you could argue about target fixation or something, but based on the video I don't think it's an easy sell to a jury.
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