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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.
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".
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.
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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