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Notes -
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.
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.
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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