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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

  2. The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.

  3. It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.

  4. it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

  5. Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.

All in all I think everybody here is a victim of the current evil in our society. A woman in a gay relationship with a recently deceased husband, in a new city, is being fed a constant stream of propaganda. I can imagine the state of mind if this person, and it isn’t pleasant.

She decided to try and help, which is good, but was essentially a pawn, or unknowing martyr for political power struggles I doubt she understood. A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber.

The iceman: I expect better than this. Unlike the woman, acting on pure propaganda fueled adrenaline, he is supposed to train for this. He also interacts with these people daily. He should be thinking rationally here, and the rational move is to just get out of the way, not walk in front of the car of a neurotic woman screaming at you. He is legally, technically in the clear, but this was immoral. Hes basically exploiting a series of laws and norms to allow him to “innocently” kill a woman as a form of retribution. This is akin in my mind to entrapment of some form. The iceman sets up a series of traps, and just waits for an untrained, trigger, fight or flight woman to fall into one of them. He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.

Unfortunately the same which gripped both the woman and the shooter is gripping everybody forming an opinion online around this. nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever. We will forever live in the reality where an iceman killed a woman in cold blood on Jan 7th 2026 in Minneapolis.

I don’t think this will metastasize into Floyd 2.0, mostly because the woman was white, but also because of the weather. We’ll see how this weekend plays out though.

A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?

It's a tragedy and a nesting doll of bad decisions. The shooting iceman is technically justified in shooting her, but he as his buddy from the other pickup were both terrible at policing and teamwork.

His goal was to get the two women to drive away and stop their sousveillance. The other iceman thought detaining them was the better option and spooked Ms. Good by loudly and aggressively demanding she get out of the fucking car. She panicked and stepped on the gas.

The next level has, of course, been discussed here already:

  • the icemen are bad at policing, but they are supposed to work in tandem with local police, but state and municipal police have been ordered not to cooperate with them
  • bleeding-heart liberal white women don't treat icemen like LEOs because they've been told icemen can't touch citizens
  • interfering with the ICE has been promoted as a prosocial activity

The path of least pain would be for the ICE to have some officers trained and dressed as police in their convoys. Trick'em out like they're auditioning for Village People and have them deal with "concerned citizens".

The way I see it is that nobody was trying to murder anyone, but two people committed aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy (and I'm not desperately impressed by the ICE agent by the car door either - scaring someone into fight-or-flight mode when your partner is standing in front of their car comes close to blue falconry by aggravated stupidity).

WTF was he doing standing in front of the car? Cops are trained not to do this for a reason. I don't like hostile mindreading, but the most plausible explanations are either complete failure to think or a Rachel Corrie-esque belief that standing in front of the car would hold it in place while his partner made the arrest.

WTF was she doing? Other than "A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless" I can't make sense of it.

Aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy shouldn't be a capital crime (except where the enemy is a foreign enemy in an actual war) but per natural law it often is. The fool from ICE got lucky. Good didn't.

If this was regular cops, the other question would be why make so much effort to effect a marginal obstruction arrest. Unless Good had done something worse than making an illegal U-turn in an area ICE were operating in, it isn't likely that obstruction charges would stick if they did arrest her. This would have been, had it worked, a contempt of cop arrest. I'm not the kind of pro-disorder leftist who thinks that contempt of cop arrests should never be made, but they are a tool for removing assholes* from the situation. If someone who is an asshole but isn't actively criming wants to be somewhere else, that is a win-win outcome.

* This is a semi-technical term used by cops

WTF was he doing standing in front of the car? Cops are trained not to do this for a reason. I don't like hostile mindreading, but the most plausible explanations are either complete failure to think or a Rachel Corrie-esque belief that standing in front of the car would hold it in place while his partner made the arrest.

You can see from the agent's POV footage (phone? bodycam?) that he'd been walking around the car to record the driver and tag info, and that he was focusing on recording the wife who'd just been yelling at him as he walked in front of the car.

The officer who shoot the decedent wasn’t originally standing in front of the car. It wasn’t until the decedent reversed at an angle that the officer was put in the path of the car. The car then accelerated and the officer pulled his gun and shot.

The officer probably should’ve been more aware of his situation but I think it’s an overstated talking point that he put himself directly in front of the car.

"A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless"

Except that she knew they were ICE agents.

In the longer videos, you can see her hand "waiving through" the ICE vehicles before she is approached. She knew who they were and knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did freak out and panic when she realized the ICE agents weren't going to play nice anymore, but it's not possible to plead ignorance and "scary masked men."

More generally, a reasonable reading of the context suggests almost beyond doubt that these are cops. It's the middle of the day, they have lights on, there's a bunch of people with cameras filming what the guys with guns are doing. If this was actually some sort of impersonation of an officer or actual bad masked men (terrorists? chechens?), it seems less than likely they'd be so nonchalant about their terroristing being filmed by bystanders.

The "I got scared so I ran" defense is one of the most commonly trotted out by those that are the most comically guilty - and aware of the guilt. It's a retreat to infancy and a desperate spasm designed to cast of any and all responsibility whatsoever. It's not quite as bald faced as a temporary insanity plea, but it's in the same ballpark.

I'm not defending the woman's behaviour, which I described as aggravated stupidity. I am attacking the ICE agents for poor police work culminating in a legal but avoidable shooting.

Allowing your fight-or-flight instincts to override common sense, causing you to do something dangerously stupid to evade cops, is not acceptable behaviour, but it is reasonably predictable behaviour. Good policing isn't just about insisting on co-operation, it is also about making it psychologically easy for an untrained normie to co-operate without panicking. That is part of why normal beat police have, going back to the time of Robert Peel, eschewed the paramilitary aesthetic.

Even if you know they are all cops, a cop in tacticool gear is scarier than a cop in a regular cop uniform. (And a cop in riot gear is even scarier). If you are trying to intimidate a hardened violent criminal into surrendering without a fight, this is a good thing. In the more common scenario where you are trying to encourage petty criminals, peaceful protesters, and randos in the wrong place at the wrong time to co-operate without making loud noises or sudden movements that could be mistaken for a threat, it is a bad thing.

I am attacking the ICE agents for poor police work culminating in a legal but avoidable shooting.

I think it is a valid criticism that ICE agents are not well-trained for performing this kind of policework. But it is the local officials who have forced them into this role, by refusing to allow local police who are better-trained for this to do their jobs. If those officials truly want to de-escalate, they should start arresting people who obstruct ICE themselves, rather than treating them as outlaws.

is not acceptable behaviour, but it is reasonably predictable behaviour

Should it really be unacceptable to do reasonably predictable behavior? At least if you're being reasonably predictable, others can be trained to maneuvre around you.

My read of the comment above yours was that she counted ICE as hostile soldiers.

I have my gripes with urbanists, but the amount of people online who diminish the deadly threat of a car driven by an agitated person is starting to make me sympathize with them.

Not to mention that there has been an ongoing arms race for a long time among suburbanite normies buying bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier vehicles, as DirtyWaterHotDog alluded to it below, because they all want more comfort and more protection from accidents.

My main complaint with Urbanists™ analysis is they fail to acknowledged that (until 2025) CAFE standards produced an enormously perverse pressure that contributed to the bigger and bigger vehicle trend. Normally people would be incentivized to buy smaller cars because they would be cheaper. The footprint model instead meant that small already efficient cars required expensive add-ons like hybridization or turbocharging to reach CAFE standards while giant trucks and SUVs could continue rolling along with much cheaper less fuel efficient systems.

There's also a pretty big gap on the enforcement. We have already crossed the diminishing returns point into negative territory with respect to additional vehicle safety you can buy. Despite progressively increasing vehicle safety standards and size, fatal crash rates are up from their lows. People clearly are at the point where their perceived safely produces absolute shit tier driver ability and attention. A huge portion of vehicular crashes are single vehicle incidents.

It's clear people in general don't realize how much of a hazard obstructing traffic with a two ton Honda Pilot is. Two things I think could help send the message that you need to pay attention and not block regular traffic.

  1. Increased enforcement against left lane campers. If you don't have the awareness to see a cop coming up from behind you and move over, you probably shouldn't be driving.
  2. Hear me out. Green light cameras. When the light turns green it detects when a car is still on the sensor after say two seconds. The light then takes a picture of the driver. If you're on your phone, automatic ticket. If whatever you're doing on your phone is more important that getting to where you're driving to, then pull off the road. I've more than once been stuck behind someone on a set of synchronized lights where me missed every green because it took them 20 seconds to move after the light change. You would think that after the line of cars behind them started honking at the first or second light that they would try to pay attention at the next red, but no. I'm sure it's wasn't just vindictiveness from being honked at too, you could see them go straight to their phone through the rear windshield.

Being distracted and obstructing traffic should not be normal parts or every day driving.

Semi related, but the US probably does need more tiers of vehicle licensing. Right now it takes extra testing and training to drive a motorcycle, where you're mostly a hazard to yourself, but until you hit 10,000 pounds GVW you're good to go with the license you got at 16. The 15 hours you spent with your driving instructor at 15 behind a 3,000 pound Chevy Cruze apparently did not prepare people to avoid rolling their Ford Explorers. Instead of being like, if you want to drive a huge SUV you have to demonstrate you are not going to be a hazard to yourself and others, we have TPMS requirements. A very small factor in this most recent incident, but the car clearly spun out the drive wheels. In that case you are clearly not in control of the car, which is at least reckless on a public road, especially when surrounded by people. TPMS discourages people running dedicated winter tiers at slightly lower pressures, even though climates like Minnesota clearly warrant them. The difference in traction on snow and ice between dedicated winter and (even good quality) all seasons is vast.

join the dark side

Imagine this discussion if the car was a tiny Renault Clio. I was hit by an accelerating car as a kid, and I got off with a few scratches because it was a tuk tuk and I was wearing a protective school bag. NGL, that bag was a formidable cushion.

He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.

Granting the argument for a second, I fundamentally disagree, more traps like this should be set up. There should be shit tests the same way the left has tried to cancel and un-employ people with the pronouns shit. They should be forced to put up or shut up for their ideology, where putting up essentially gives the authorities a carte blanche to imprison or use force against them.

This gets pretty close to calling for legalisation of entrapment. Do you understand why that particular fence was put there, if you want to remove it?

I don’t understand the american obsession with entrapment. In other countries the definition is more lax and sting operations are used to greater effect.

Can you explain why the fence is there, beyond ‘a cop forced me to do it’?

Agree. Building “golden” off ramps is just going to incite more of this shit, where people think disrupting police activity is acceptable and then panicked fleeing when they are detained. Even if officers try to comically deferentially deescalate, it’s a fundamentally dangerous scenario to embolden. What happens when a detainee hurts someone or the fleeing driver hits a bystander in their recklessness.

And the whole, find them later and arrest them, is also a joke. First the massive waste of resources and difficulty, second what happens when those involve reckless fleeing. “Officer showed up at their home and they ended up shot” is going to be much worse optics than it happening at the scene

Agree. Building “golden” off ramps is just going to incite more of this shit

Yes, in formulating policy, one needs to keep in mind that these Leftists are not ordinary criminals but rather organized agitators who are there to disrupt, obstruct, and provoke. If an additional "off-ramp" is set up, these protestors will only adjust their tactics so as to dance even closer to the line of full on attacking the government agents.

these Leftists are not ordinary criminals but rather organized agitators who are there to disrupt, obstruct, and provoke

What is the difference from a mob, in practical terms?

What is the difference from a mob, in practical terms?

Let me give you a hypothetical: Suppose that ICE were to implement a policy that if a person is sitting behind the wheel of a running vehicle, and that vehicle is obstructing them, they will not attempt to arrest that person until they have read that person a formal statement and then given the person a chance to calmly drive away. (So that there is a nice "off-ramp" on the path to escalation.) In that case, these protestors will almost certainly adjust their tactics by blocking ICE with vehicles, ignoring any requests to move, waiting for that formal statement, and then driving around the block while other vehicles block ICE, their drivers confident that they can similarly ignore any requests to move.

With a random mob, there is a chance that adding "off-ramps" might actually improve the situation. A random, unprepared person who is asked to disperse by the authorities might actually comply.

Yes, it's true that an off-ramp to escalation could be gamed by protestors. But it seems to me that the situation is already being gamed by the police (or ICE in this case), and that isn't good either, especially since the police can game things that protestors can't.

Yes, it's true that an off-ramp to escalation could be gamed by protestors. But it seems to me that the situation is already being gamed by the police (or ICE in this case), and that isn't good either, especially since the police can game things that protestors can't.

How exactly are the police gaming the situation?

Mobs are dangerous but dumb. Police have developed tactics over the centuries to disperse mobs, or at least divert them into areas where they do less damage. These won't work on organized agitators, and if there's a mob that's being directed by the organized agitators, they will work less well.

How and when did this form of organized agitation start? If it stretches back more than a few decades, why haven't police tactics adapted?

Speaking of not getting shot when doing a follow up detention of some one who has fled, is the current procedure to freeze all bank assets? How about making phone/internet/power companies unilaterally cut off services?

Right wing Americans in the 1700s to early 2000s: "I hate the government, I don't trust the government, cops are tools of the state to tread on my freedoms"

Right wing Americans in the 2020s: "should the state freeze all your assets and cut off your power when you have not been convicted of a crime and haven't even had your Miranda rights read to you yet?"

How the mighty have fallen...

Right Wingers who aren't even under any clear criminal investigation frequently get debanked by Paypal and whatnot just off vibes. Meanwhile one can be an active obstructionist of the right tribe and essentially do whatever they like without pissing off the payment processing overlords.

Right Wingers who aren't even under any clear criminal investigation frequently get debanked by Paypal and whatnot just off vibes

This is terrible and should not happen either

I was doing some research and there were 260k ICE detentions for 2025 alone, and afik this is the only incident where a non-detainee died during the detention process,and more so, and only 20 detainees have died while being detained, for reasons unrelated to excessive force. The overwhelming majority of arrests are uneventful and professional. Even if he was in the wrong, incidents such as this are exceedingly rare, even more so compared to traffic police stops. Just as police shooting videos occasionally go viral and it's unclear who was in the wrong, this was bound to eventually happen with an ICE arrest, too.

Why is this so complex to people? Would anyone disagree with the following summary?

  1. She appears to have been trying to hinder/block ICE activities.
  2. She appears to have been trying to flee when she was shot, not kill ICE agents
  3. The front of her car contacted the agent that shot her.
  4. His shots were fired at a point where he personally was not in danger.
  5. He could have simply stepped out of the way of the car unharmed, as he eventually did.
  6. Legally the shooting seems defensible if not exactly ironclad given who knows how the politics plays out (see: Chauvin).

Open Questions:

  1. If he could have stepped out of the way of the car without shooting, is he morally (not legally) obligated to?
  2. Is it reasonable to expect him to recognize the danger has passed and to stop shooting in the fraction of a second this transpired and her car turned away?

Overall I don’t see the great significance of this case as it seems arguable either way. Even the most ardent anti-ICE types have to admit she was retarded, rammed him with her car and basically is a classic case of FAFO, not some random uninvolved innocent.

Even the most loyal police-supporter must recognize he could’ve easily avoided shooting her with no harm done and she doesn’t exactly deserve to die, making this in some sense a tragedy.

His shots were fired at a point where he personally was not in danger.

Are you talking about general, objective danger with the benefit of hindsight; or are you talking about what he would have perceived at the time?

Even the most loyal police-supporter must recognize he could’ve easily avoided shooting her with no harm done

This may be true with the benefit of hindsight, but not necessarily given what he knew and saw that first quarter of a second.

In any event, I would be concerned about imposing a duty to retreat on the police. Especially since they are dealing with an adversary which would surely take advantage of any such duty so as to maximally hinder and obstruct the police.

I think it’s important to add the context that this particular agent suffered serious injuries from being run over previously when trying to detain an illegal sex offender. It might explain why he was trigger happy when getting hit by a fucking car.

Maybe he should stop standing in front of cars? He of all people should understand this

He actually wasn’t in front of the car until the driver reversed.

It's good police policy not to stand in front of cars but also clearly a crime to actually try to run them over. Same way that saying 'officers should seek cover in a firefight' doesn't equate to 'shooting an officer outside of cover should be less penalized since it's easier'

He wasn't actually in front of the car when it started moving. Further it turns out to be impractical to do the work he does without at some point being in front of a (stationary) vehicle.

If he could have stepped out of the way of the car without shooting, is he morally (not legally) obligated to?

The officer's action is like dropping a gun where a pedestrian might flee, so that if the pedestrian flees, the officer can say "for all I know the pedestrian could have been trying to get the gun" and shoot the pedestrian. It's a form of taking himself hostage so that he can shoot in "self-defense". Morally, he should not take himself hostage in this manner.

Is it reasonable to expect him to recognize the danger has passed and to stop shooting in the fraction of a second this transpired and her car turned away?

I would say it is reasonable to expect him to recognize when the danger has passed, because he was the one who made it difficult to recognize the danger in the first place. He shouldn't make it difficult and then expect anyone to give him slack because it's difficult.

And again, yes this does apply when the protestor is the one deliberately standing in front of the car.

The front of her car contacted the agent that shot her.

Have you ever been hit by a car? Even at parking lot speeds, they hit hard enough to wreck your shit. If you go under the wheels, the driver's intentions don't matter.

Large SUVs are especially dangerous because the high hood means you get knocked to the ground and then run over instead of thrown on top

Seems like almost a pure accident to me. The driver panics when an aggressive man yanks on her car's door handle, and tries to get away ASAP. Officer with an itchy trigger finger interprets the car accelerating at him and decides to shoot first and ask questions later.

Of course, if you go looking for fault then you can definitely dig some up. She shouldn't have been there in the first place. She should have listened to the directions of the officers. She shouldn't have panicked. The Iceman shouldn't have been in front of the car. He should have focused on getting out of the way instead of pulling out a gun. Shooting wouldn't have made a difference since he was so close. He wasn't in the vehicle's path when he shot -- it actually sort of looks like he leaned in to get a better angle to shoot.

Partisans will selectively parse evidence to support their side and vilify their outgroup. The fact it's ambiguous makes it a pretty good scissor event, though I doubt it will reach the heights of BLM since that was a 3-standard deviation phenomenon.

scissor event

@beej67 argues as much.

For all the nerds who enjoy playing video games, there is a FPS game called Ready Or Not which involve disarm criminals who either captured civilians or disguised as them, while it is only a game and hurting civilians only lower our score, we can also restart if we die, it do give me and my friends a new perspective on what pressure police is under in these situation

One main pressure is, you never know if someone is armed and potentially kill you before you restrain them, people can comply all you orders all day long but one last non-compliance and kill half of your team

In my opinion we don't pay police enough for them to risk their life in these situations, rationally they should always shoot first given any legal justification

If police aren't paid enough to sometimes not shoot people, surely the civilians on the other side of the interaction - who are paid even less - are even more justified in shooting?

Home defence? Yes Street? No

As a non-american, to me bringing firearm out of home as civilians comes with higher than normal responsibility and expectation from society of you are not expected to use it, while police are required and expected to use lethal force in certain situations with the risk of misjudging can mean their own life

In my opinion, a better solution will be to increase police responsibility on lethal/non-lethal force usage AND responsibility of failing to respond, while simultaneously increase their pay level to balance out these increased responsibilities

If medical doctor's training and responsibility give them such a high wage, police's training and responsibility should be on a similar level with similar pay

Sure! For example a long time ago I heard of a case where the police was executing an arrest warrant, but got the wrong address. The owner thought he's being burgled and opened fire, and luckily for him, he managed to survive the whole ordeal that resulted from that. He got taken to court, where it was indeed determined that he was justified in shooting.

And it happened in Germany!

will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge?

He'll avoid it. Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper in Ruby Ridge was charged with murder, because he is a murderer, but the case was thrown out.

https://famous-trials.com/rubyridge/1142-idahovhoriuchi

the Supreme Court has held that the Supremacy Clause cloaks federal agents with immunity if they act reasonably in carrying out their responsibilities. See In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1, 75

There's an if there, but my call is no state murder trial.

Um, did you read the case? He was charged with murder, and the District Court dismissed on immunity grounds, and the 9th Circuit, in the opinion you linked, reversed the District Court and allowed the case to proceed. Subsequent to this the en banc 9th Circuit upheld the decision. Horiuchi ultimately wasn't prosecuted, but that's because the successor to the original prosecutor dropped the charges. All of this is irrelevant anyway since Minnesota isn't in the 9th Circuit. There may be other caselaw out there but I haven't seen anything to suggest that a state prosecution would be precluded entirely.

New York v. Tanella, 374 F.3d 141 (2nd Cir. 2004) or Texas v. Kleinart, 855 F.3d 305 (5th Cir. 2017), are probably the kind of thing you're looking for, but those are admittedly other circuits.

It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.

What happened to "be charitable"? She's just a libbed out body who got scared when she saw the people she was reading about online in real life. The people who will disappear her, deport her to El Salvador, put her in a cattle wagon straight to an Auschwitz equivalent located in Texas. Then she panicked and tried to flee without thinking too hard how her actions are going to be interpreted by a hostile party. Why instantly jump to accusing her trying to kill someone?

Who said she was trying to kill him? Regardless, the law of self-defense doesn't care about intentions, it cares about articulable, reasonable beliefs. It was reasonable for the agent to believe that the driver of the car, who resisted his force earlier, would use the car to cause death or great bodily injury to him, was capable of doing so, and was an imminent threat, and because of that, it was reasonable for him to use deadly force to stop the threat.

Who said she was trying to kill him? Regardless, the law of self-defense doesn't care about intentions, it cares about articulable, reasonable beliefs. It was reasonable for the agent to believe that the driver of the car, who resisted his force earlier, would use the car to cause death or great bodily injury to him, was capable of doing so, and was an imminent threat, and because of that, it was reasonable for him to use deadly force to stop the threat.

I agree, but I also think that a person who shows up to intentionally aggravate a situation doesn't deserve much in the way of charity. They must be on their very best behavior.

Simplistically I voted for this. We won the election. I got ICE to enforce immigration law. As you said he’s been run over before. I don’t want my tax dollars going to him trying to be nice to people obstructing him from doing his job. I voted for ICE enforcing immigration law which includes using deadly force with people obstructed him from doing his job. One dead obstructor should eliminate thousands of others from obstructing. FAFO.

This wasn’t cosplay. I even read an article where an obstructor remarked what are they using real bullets instead of rubber bullets. Believe it or not but ICE are real policemen doing a real job of deporting millions of people unlawfully in America.

Well, invoking FAFO and what-not is always fun, but is there any sort of universal principle at play here or is it all who/whom? Would you be willing to bite the FAFO pill on the Jan 6th rioter (Ashley Babbitt or what her name was) that got shot while breaking into the Capitol? People there figure they won the election after voting to crack down on Trump-associated chaos, too.

Would you be willing to bite the FAFO pill on the Jan 6th rioter

Yes, and both are downstream of the same problem: we've developed a culture where 'protestors' are allowed to do almost anything and expect no reaction or meaningful punishment... until they meet the one person that reacts.

Its simply a bad comparison. The central problem with Jan6th is that the Capital Police consistently failed to do their job, and those failures were the cause that escalated the protest into a riot, and eventually into Babbitt's death. Its important to note that the officer that shot Babbitt was not the first one she encountered that day, she had just walked past several other officers who were acting as if she was legally inside the building. There is no such lack of cohesion here by the ICE officers. None of them are telling her to drive while another is telling her to stop.

I think the Jan 6 fought against the regime and fafo. Now I like the Jan6 people but they got the punishment you get when you fight the current regime. And then they were mostly pardoned when we got a new regime.

Whether the 2020 election had fraud doesn’t matter. They protested and fought the regime that took power and got what happens to people who fight the current political power. I thank them for their service .

The central problem with Jan6th is that the Capital Police consistently failed to do their job, and those failures were the cause that escalated the protest into a riot

I had thought that riots are caused by the rioters rioting. I can kind-of see one making the argument that undercover agents incited the crowd, but I can't see how the police failing to prevent people from entering a building is what causes people to enter a building, as if this particular crowd of people is just a force of nature with no agency or responsibility.

Seems like you don't understand the psychology of riots. Very few people set out to riot, and certainly there is little evidence jan 6 was such a time. Instead protests escalate to riots when certain factors come to play, most notably on J6 was that no actual guidance was given by police as to what borders were going to be enforced. Instead there was a shoddily constructed perimeter which was quickly abandoned, and then the fleeing police failed to secure the doorways.

That is the proper, traditional Riot. What is muddying it is the conflation of "riots" where a group of people go to a protest looking for trouble ahead of time, armed and armored. Jan 6 seems like a traditional riot. BLM and Anti-ICE protests have been something else, but called a protest/riot for some reason.

Edit: Kids these days, can't even riot properly! SMH.

failing

You mean, given the command to let them in. I'm sure if the govt wanted to post the god damned military with rifles there they could have stopped an unarmed crowd of Q-propagandized boomers from entering.

A lot of people had to do dumb shit they shouldn't have done for Babbit's death to fall out of it, is what I take that person's point to be.

Pointing out that the police did something wrong doesn't require thinking the rioters were in the right. People have this zero-sum picture of how blame works that just doesn't correspond to reality at all. You see it from the other political direction in "victim-blaming" discourse - "maybe you shouldn't have dressed like that or gotten that drunk" does not mean "the guy who assaulted you did nothing wrong and you deserved it", but when people get emotional common sense gets left behind. In a lot of these situations, a lot had to go wrong, many people contributed to it, some of them doubtless behaved worse than others, but even so, it makes no sense to insist there is one and only party at fault.

Yes. The Ashley Babbitt shooting was justified. Waco was justified. Arguably Kent State was justified. It is okay to use force against people resisting law-enforcement activity.

I suspect an agent provocateur of some kind triggered Kent state by firing rifle shots over the heads of the guardsmen. There were several soldiers that reported that they opened fire because they were being shot at, and civilian reports of seeing armed people in civilian clothes. And the shooting doesn’t really track like a traditional riot control accident given the diatances involved.

This case looks a lot more justified than Babbitt. Accelerating a vehicle towards a police officer is an imminent threat of death or serious harm, while Babbitt was unarmed and did not present an immediate threat to anyone. The officer could have used force, but I don't think they were justified to use deadly force given the circumstances.

Being overrun by a hostile mob seems to me like an imminent threat of serious harm, too. In retrospect we know the protestors were unarmed and mostly well-behaved (by riot standards, anyway), but the officer couldn't have known that.

I'll take that trade-off; even if you disagree with the authority of the government, disobeying an armed individual and taking actions that make you look like a threat can result in death, so both people FAFO.

I'd appreciate it if the other half of the deal also came through (as in, given the January 6th individuals were charged with assault and interference with officers, I'd appreciate it if the people obstructing ICE were charged with the same). Or alternatively, that both groups are pardoned.

Edit, to clarify a bit:

I'm of the opinion that although you have the right to protest, your right ends where others begin - so gluing yourself to the highway, impeding officers by blocking their cars in, blowing up cop cars, and assaulting individuals all are things that you can and should be arrested for. This is a good thing - if people agree with your position, there will be outcry against your arrest. Part of the reason that the civil rights movement worked was that the police were put in a position where they had to arrest people for things that are hard to consider a crime - things like being black in a whites-only diner, or sitting in the wrong spot on the bus. But an important point here is for the protest to work, the government needs to arrest you for breaking the law, and most people can't agree that the actions you took deserved you being arrested.

The "Just Stop Oil" protestors who keep attempting to deface works of art should expect that they'll be serving jailtime for their actions - because the act of protest is the act of committing crimes in an attempt to prove the laws unjust. Acting surprised when you are protesting in an annoying and illegal way for a cause that the majority does not support gets you arrested is just not examining how protests actually change things.

I am very frustrated by the number of protestors who seem to not have any understanding of how this works; if the government simply reacts to your protest by doing what you wanted, then it wasn't your protest that did it - it's what they wanted to do anyways.

I even read an article where an obstructor remarked what are they using real bullets instead of rubber bullets.

I saw the video, but can't find a link now. Basically a black dude was filming on his porch directly in front of where the woman's car finally crashed. Her partner? was sitting on his driveway screaming 'Why did you use real bullets?!' amongst other things.

I think the woman and her partner didn't understand the seriousness of the situation they were putting themselves into by choosing to obstruct a law enforcement operation and attend a protest.

Edit: Found a link. Might be taken down quick.

2nd Edit: Full version

I voted for ICE enforcing immigration law which includes using deadly force with people obstructed him from doing his job.

If the issue was the woman obstructing a law officer, then surely arresting her would have been an appropriate and proportional response? I doubt this would have become a viral story if that was all that ended up happening.

Most people who find the situation outrageous seem to think so because they believe the suspect was truly trying to flee and not hit any of the officers, and they therefore think that the use of deadly force was not appropriate. Separate from any of the facts of the case, is it your position that merely obstructing law officers or fleeing law officers should be punishable by immediate death?

Because I can say that sounds like a cure that is worse than the disease to me.

fleeing law officers should be punishable by immediate death?

Fleeing in a car? Yes. If you try to take the police on a car chase where you can slam into random civilians in an attempt to escape you should be shot before you get the chance to take anyone else down. Thinking you could just get away with it if you resist hard enough shouldn't be encouraged.

To make this even slightly possible the penalties for non-murderous lesser crimes should be reduced to reduce the incentive to try and flee.

Tennessee v. Garner supports using deadly force to stop a suspect if they are a danger to the community, and Plumhoff v. Rickard is a case directly supporting shooting such a driver who was considered a deadly threat to others under the totality of the circumstances.

I disagree. Getting rid of obstruction is a cure that I very much want to solve the disease.

To your question. Yes. I think the police can kill to enforce the law.

To your question. Yes. I think the police can kill to enforce the law.

This sort of doesn't answer my question. I think everyone except for the most committed anarchists believe it is appropriate for police to kill to enforce the law in at least some circumstances.

What I am interested in is what the limits to your position are? For example, you mentioned voting in your original post as a possible source of law enforcement legitimacy. Given that there is a fair argument that Donald Trump would have won the 2020 elections if not for COVID, and thus it was the democratic will of the people to have harsher lockdowns, under what circumstances do you think it would have been appropriate for law enforcement to kill people who violated curfews or lockdowns in 2020-2022?

I guess I'm curious if you recognize any limiting principle on law enforcement's use of lethal force? Do you hold democratic will above constitutional limits? Do you bite the bullet when your political opponents are in power, and accept that they can pass and enforce laws that might make you a criminal under the right circumstances?

We already crossed this rubicon. Yes they can and did in 2020-2024.

They did. I wasn’t allowed to work or travel to weddings during Covid. They won the election. They enforced their will.

But this situation is different since the person who died used physical force on an officer. I guess I shouldn’t get shot on the street for violating Covid rules but if I hit an officer while violating those rules I am at the mercy of the regime.

We already crossed this rubicon. Yes they can and did in 2020-2024.

They did. I wasn’t allowed to work or travel to weddings during Covid. They won the election. They enforced their will.

I understand that they did that. I'm asking you if you consider that legitimate within your own political beliefs?

Is it just might makes right, and the will of the people as interpreted by whoever is currently in charge, or do you believe that the law or its enforcement can, in principle, be wrong or invalid for some reason?

As another set of examples, do you consider the American Revolutionary War or the American Civil War to be just wars? Is it ever correct to rebel against the current authorities? If so, what circumstances make it correct or legitimate?

Yes. Might makes right. I don’t believe multicultural societies and Democracy are compatible

Revolutionary War from a moral perspective was not just.

But if you win then you win.

Is it just might makes right, and the will of the people as interpreted by whoever is currently in charge, or do you believe that the law or its enforcement can, in principle, be wrong or invalid for some reason?

What an interesting question. What do you see as the implications of that statement being either true or false?

I do personally prefer the old rule that police or civilians can use deadly force to subdue criminals fleeing from a felony. Obstruction would not be a common law felony but thats only relevant for a question where the cop shot her in the back while she's on foot.

Sure, arresting her would have been reasonable. That's why they tried to do it.

Unfortunately, she tried to escape by driving through the police cordon, and they, understandably, thought she was trying to run one of them over and shot her. It's a tragedy that could have easily been avoided had she 1) not been there or 2) cooperated with the arrest(realistically I doubt she faces charges).

For what it is worth, I think your position and /u/The_Nybbler's are both fairly reasonable takes.

They don't seem to be what /u/Opt-out was saying, hence me asking the question the way I did. I don't believe anyone else in this thread has implied that they think law enforcement officers should kill people who merely obstruct them, and I was trying to clarify whether it was just a sloppily worded post or whether it represented their true opinion on the subject.

If the issue was the woman obstructing a law officer, then surely arresting her would have been an appropriate and proportional response?

Surely. But when one officer attempted to arrest her, she attempted to flee by driving her car through the space occupied by another officer.

My intention was to clarify /u/Opt-out's exact position. I didn't want to jump to conclusions based on potentially sloppy wording.

I don't know, based on the comment I'm responding to alone, whether they would make the sort of statement you're making here, or whether they would disagree and say that even attempting arrest would not have been necessary in this case, and going straight to trying to kill her would have been appropriate and (potentially) just. Hence my question.

it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

Nothing about this is reasonable. That is an enormous and entirely-unwarranted leap in logic. Possible isn't the same as probable.

the other thing is if the guy has been run over before it is not retribution it is reacting to previous stimuli. dude doesn't want to be run over again so does the only thing that might prevent him from being run over.

If someone is driving a car towards you, and you shoot them, how does that stop the car? Especially at point blank range. It just means you both get fucked up.

The best way to not get hit by cars is to not walk into places that their nose is or could be pointing at.

Much the same as someone pointing a gun at you though -- just because deadly force may not always prevent deadly force doesn't mean that you can't try it.

Did I say probable?

Reasonable is the correct word here. Crazy gangstalking conspiracies are possible, body doubles and crisis actors are possible, but these are both unreasonable.

Considering that the officer's state of mind was being effected by his previous encounter with a protestor and their car is both possible and reasonable.

The adjective "reasonable" as applied to a conclusion is often (though not always) exclusive of other conclusions also being considered reasonable; definite vs. indefinite article helps, but there wasn't an article here. TitaniumButterfly was objecting to the idea that your hypothesis was the reasonable conclusion.

"Plausible" would be a synonym for the sense you intended without the ambiguity.

We’re splitting hairs here. You’re right plausible would also work, but I think what I was saying was clear.

Yes of course it is obvious to assume his previous history was affecting his state of mind.

But it isn’t obvious it affected it in the way you postulated (ie revenge) but instead may (likely?) created fear.

It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer

Well I saw the video and it looks obvious to me that she was trying to escape and drive around the ICE employees. I don't know why we would jump to the conclusion that a suburban, educated white woman would suddenly try to murder someone for no reason. Other people can interpret the subtle movements of the car's wheels differently, but it's far from "unambiguous".

nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever

I don't need a NY Times analysis to know she was trying to escape, I can just watch the video and apply basic common sense and pattern recognition. Not everything is a media narrative, sometimes people just disagree about what happened.

It doesn't matter that she was not trying to murder someone. What matters is that she was an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to the agent standing near the car. I emphasize imminent because this happened in a matter of seconds and expecting anyone to instantly predict the path of a car they are standing next to -- whose driver you already know is uncooperative -- is unreasonable. For similar reasons, it doesn't matter if she was trying to escape, notwithstanding that a reasonable person would not attempt to flee police in the first place.

Yesterday I wanted to reserve judgment until I saw body cam footage. If ICE was conducting an “enforcement action,” their policy is supposedly to have cameras on. It should make the direction of the car obvious.

I think we started from similar assumptions about the role of the officers. ICE has the funding, the manpower, and the operational initiative. They ought to have a better plan than having some guy stand out on a frozen road. And if that really is the best they can do, they should at least be able to cover their asses. Do it by the book. Show us the book. Release the footage. Not this tight-mouthed bullshit.

Sure, ICE almost certainly is not following the best policing practices ever. But driving directly at an officer while resisting arrest is still a darwin award.

I mean these federal agencies are designed to operate with local LEO support, but in blue states that is refused. That causes problems.

Furthermore ICE is the victim of an organized protest movement that has a specific goal of making it impossible for them to do their job safely. Well.....it works.

Furthermore ICE is the victim of an organized protest movement that has a specific goal of making it impossible for them to do their job safely

I more or less agree with this. Anyone who argues that ICE should have better plans and procedures needs to address the point that whatever these plans and procedures are, these protestors are going to develop counter-plans and counter-procedures designed to frustrate, provoke, and embarrass to the maximum extent possible.

So, for example, suppose ICE implements a policy that they won't try to apprehend someone behind the wheel of a running car but will instead photograph the person's license plate and arrest that person on a future date. In that case, you can bet that these protestors will (1) arrange their cars, with the engines running, so as to block ICE vehicles; and (2) use borrowed cars so frustrate any attempts to later apprehend the drivers.

I mean these federal agencies are designed to operate with local LEO support, but in blue states that is refused. That causes problems.

I've seen this as the most consistent problem with recent ICE operations. Local police should be controlling the crowd. Actually there shouldn't be a crowd at all. Somehow there is a coordinated convoy stalking the ICE facilities and either blocking the facility itself, or tailing the vehicles to disrupt them as they go to make an arrest elsewhere.

Local Mayors deliberately refuse support, then when the situation escalates into violence, use it as ammunition to pressure ICE to leave their cities. All this helps their public opinion at the cost of public safety.

This is the result of policy that is designed to both accomplish something, and be maximally inflammatory to own the libs.

The way ICE has been set up, and communicated, which I will refer to as "the policy" as a shorthand, is a bad (or suboptimal) policy for enforcing immigration.

If you want to accomplish a policy goal, and your chosen avenue to do this causes roughly 50% of your population to hate it, and a smaller subset of that 50% to actively interfere, and for local politicians of areas dominated by that 50% to get popular support by opposing the policy, it's a stupid fucking policy. I'm not against ICE or its goals, but having local mayors and PDs refuse to help means you now cannot enforce immigration as effectively.

You can enforce immigration, you can own the libs, you cannot do both at once as effectively as focusing on one.

A well designed policy (or software system, or basically anything designed) has to take into account the way the average person will interact with it. It doesn't matter if your solution is theoretically the best solution in the world if it starts going sideways when it starts interacting with the world.

Another way of looking at this, if Spock and the Vulcans were designing ICE to maximize the number of immigrants removed from America, they wouldn't have made ICE so emotionally charged (it still would have become emotionally charged, but they'd do everything they could to mitigate that, instead of inflame it).

This is the chickens of bad policy coming home to roost. If you don't want this to happen in blue cities, design better.

If you want an example of genuis policy in a similar vein, bussing migrants to NYC a few years ago was a masterstroke. Lowered support for immigration AND owned the libs, it was deeply impressive.

There are huge bottlenecks for the Federal Government w/r/t deportation. It takes years to get the final order of removal for everyone. If they want to achieve their goal of reducing illegal immigration, they need to try to create strong disincentives for illegal immigration outside the normal process.

So they set up ways to soften the blow of self-deporting. Just use an app, we'll set up a flight anywhere you want to go and give you cash.

And if you don't self-deport, here is the consequence. Swift arrest without being able to settle your affairs.

An estimated 1.9 million people self-deported this year, with or without the app. Far more people are leaving on their own than are being removed by ICE.

More importantly, this signals to others not to make the attempt. Even when the US goes back under control of the Dems, there will always be this hesitancy for an entire generation of people. "Do I really want to go to the US, set up a life, just to risk the Americans electing another Trump and losing everything I built?" Now it seems possible in a way it didn't before.

ICE will never deport a tenth as many people as it can disincentivize from staying.

You can enforce immigration, you can own the libs, you cannot do both at once as effectively as focusing on one.

Doesn't the whole sanctuary city thing indicate that even if you're trying to enforce the most milquetoast sort of stuff in this arena a decent amount of the country will just say 'No fuck you' and jam up the gears deliberately? Especially considering the Sanctuary City movement started in the 1980s and is almost 50 years old so you can't even say it's responsive to Republicans or Trump.

I do also think the clumsy visibility of ICE is intentional for two reasons. Firstly, it means that the Republican base feels that 'something is being done' to a degree that it hasn't in recent history since a plethora of headlines are generated. Secondly, it does a lot to change the tone of immigration and IMO has probably been part of why fresh incursions are very low.

The way ICE has been set up, and communicated, which I will refer to as "the policy" as a shorthand, is a bad (or suboptimal) policy for enforcing immigration.

Well if you were a senior official in the Trump Administration, how would you suggest changing the Policy so as to be substantially more effective?

they wouldn't have made ICE so emotionally charged (it still would have become emotionally charged, but they'd do everything they could to mitigate that, instead of inflame it).

By doing exactly what?

It is unambiguous that the officer was in the way of the car, it is not unambiguous that it was done with the intent to hit him. In a stressful panic filled moment where her attention was on the guys directly to the left of her, it is quite plausible she just didn't notice him get into that position to begin with.

This slowmo is probably the best thing for it yet. Where do you think her attention was focused? Probably on the masked man trying to reach into her car, and not the guy who was walking in front.

Likewise, he probably wasn't thinking of "revenge". He is just walking there on his phone, sees the car start to pull towards him and he panics too and pulls out his gun and shoots. Because if he wasn't panicking and was thinking through every movement, then he's an idiot for thinking shooting the driver would slow down/stop a car instead of using those precious seconds moving his body out of the way.

Edit: Actually, turns out there is video evidence from the front of it now too https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794?si=JPc0rc7f7RQbuIf1 the guy literally just walks in front of the car as she's already pulling away and her wheels are turned towards the right away from him.

Yeah, I don't think was this intentional from her. She was distracted and in panic by the men grabbing at her and he seems like an idiot too busy focusing on his phone to think "is it stupid to walk in front of a car?"

Had the vehicle not moved, the spot the officer stopped moving would not have been in front of the vehicle. If you go frame by frame you can see he stops in the area covered by the tree. If you compare that to the angle of the car before it starts moving, if it moves straight forward it would not hit that spot.

I think it's pretty clear the woman did not begin backing up the war with the intention of running someone over.

I also think it's clear the officer did not deliberately position himself in front of the car with the intention of stopping the vehicle.

Considering the officer's previous experience of being run over by a car in a previous incident, it's possible he entered into a fight response, and in response he took out his gun to shoot at a perceived threat. But in reality she wasn't trying to hit an officer, she was in a moment of panic trying to run away from the officer that grabbed the vehicle's door.

It's important to note this all happens in a matter of seconds. There's a lot of analysis about what we can see from behind the car being able to rewind and watch what happened frame by frame. In contrast there is very little analysis about what the situation looked like from the perspective of the officer that took the shot (partially because there is still no footage from the officer's POV).

Stephen Crowder has an attempt at an analysis, although I find it a bit lacking and the positions to be off, but I think the key point he attempts to tackle is general correct, in that the officer has no vision of the direction of the wheel of the vehicle.

Now there could be an argument made about what the officer should've done as soon as the car starts moving backwards. I think my instinctual response would actually to walk backwards, which would actually put me MORE in the path of the car, but it's also possible this may have caused my figure to be more clearly in front of the car and maybe the woman wouldn't have accelerated forward to begin with.

Regardless, I think any analysis assuming he was trying to walk in front of the car is incorrect. I think there can be discussion to be had about his reaction once the car starts moving, but again this happens in a matter of seconds and I'm giving the officer some leeway here considering his previous experience of being run over. (There is also some potential discussion to be had about how someone would react if they had previously been in an incident and how fit that makes them to continue doing their job).

I think it wasn't a great shoot (especially for general optics), but also the officer was in a position where it's reasonable for him to say he perceived mortal danger (which was most likely contributed to by his earlier vehicular incident) which justifies the shot. But if people are going to make a policy of borderline-legal obstructionism of ICE at every turn that's inherently going to increase the surface area for incidents like this to occur

someone else has already raised this but should the same charity be extended to James Fields in the Charlottesville attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack).

Well, not anymore, but you could have maintained a charitable stance right up to the end of his trial.

Looking at the case, it's unlikely. Fields plead guilty and admitted to intentionally driving into the crowd with hostile intent, striking dozens of people before fleeing the scene, which even if the hit is accidental, hit and runs are still illegal. He was also found guilty on all charges by a jury.

These don't seem to be directly comparable cases, he had his due process and the public found him in the wrong.

I remember analyzing that at the time. I know those streets in cville. GPS would never take you that way. He chose to drive down that street.

I think if she had hit and killed the officer instead of getting shot and killed shed be getting a murder charge like James Fields.

And if someone had shot James Fields on that street as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right.

some of the roads were blocked off so GPS would instruct drivers to use a path which was impossible to use which meant people there trying to leave were just turning down roads trying to find ones which weren't blocked off so they could leave; the entire area was a complete mess

fields chose to turn down that road because of the armed group of counter protestors who pointed a gun at him

as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right

when? when he was going 25mph down the road, when he slowed before the crowd at which point his vehicle was hit by flag or bat, and then he accelerated into the crowd?

it is just not believable that fields wanted to ram anyone let alone ram his way through a crowd until he was already surrounded, had already had a gun pointed at him by a different group of people, went down another street, was surrounded by another group of people, had his car attacked, and then hit the accelerator

sometimes from different people's perspectives, they can each be reasonably "in the right" if they used deadly violence against each other

I feel like this is missing the difference between "these people could rip me from my car and do whatever they want, it's an angry mob, bad stuff has happened before and I could be next" and "ripped from the car and arrested" in terms of threat provided by what is happening outside the vehicle.

Your perspective is missing "I placed myself with a deadly weapon (a car) in a situation where it could be used as a deadly weapon"

Without that caveat I'd say both Fields and this lady have much more defensible reactions with their vehicles.

But vehicles are shitty deadly weapons. They are endangered by people to the sides of the vehicle, but they are deadly against people in front of and behind the vehicle. So self defense is much harder to justify.

Kyle Rittenhouse brought a deadly weapon to a protest and then managed to kill three people only in self defense. Ironically if he had been in a vehicle his body count likely would have been higher and against people in front of the vehicle and not his direct aggressors to the sides of the vehicle.

in terms of threat provided by what is happening outside the vehicle.

In terms of objective threat, sure.

But that's the entire debate in a nutshell: if one suffers from a [perhaps reasonable] expectation that cops are about to black-bag you, and in attempting to flee from them get shot by one who [perhaps reasonably] believes you're going to drive right into him, is it reasonable to suffer death under those circumstances?

Of course, we already have an answer to that: 12 locals and the relevant executive have to agree it isn't reasonable, since either one can [from a subjective standpoint] pardon, and the executive spends political power to do that.

Which is probably what it's going to come down to.

Objectively speaking nothing happened to Fields, even after he killed people, while Good was shot three times. So the threat is definitely different but not in the way you intended, I think.

My assertion is that an agitated mob of protestors is more of a lethal threat outside of a vehicle than cops arresting you is.

You can absolutely alter the threat level by doing things like leaning out of your car and shouting racial slurs, or threatening/assaulting the police with a deadly weapon (potentially by accident in this case, but still). The baseline is important however.

Also, who the administration considers cops to be varies.

In a protestor-friendly administration, the fiery-but-peaceful protestors (who are enforcing the law the administration wished it could have) have qualified immunity while the cops don't; in one that is not so friendly, they do not.

She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders. Doesn't really matter if at the exact moment her foot was on the gas she meant to hit him or not. Play stupid games win stupid etc.

She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders.

According to witness reports, she was also being told to leave. It's hard not to resist lawful orders if they're contradicting themselves.

It's also of course hard to know what is a lawful order if you don't even know who is giving them. Masked men popping out of an unmarked vehicle would not indicate police to me, nor many others.

Crazy how she ended up in the middle of a ICE enforcement activity at random after following them around all day

Did you watch the first video link? Specifically, the first few seconds have:

  1. A pickup truck with blue and red lights flashing in it.
  2. Someone saying "get the fuck out of our neighborhood".
  3. Two individuals coming out of the truck, one of whom says "get out of the car" twice, then "get out of the fucking car".

So unless the video is a fake, she was not being told to leave, and I think it is reasonable to assume (based on #1 and #2) that these individuals were at minimum police of some form, and probably known to be ICE.

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

I haven't seen this claim before, so I found this article discussing the issue, in case anyone else here might be curious about this piece of information.

https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/nation-world/ice-agent-who-shot-minnesota-woman-dragged-by-car-in-june-by-fleeing-child-sex-offender-renee-good-dhs-ice-mn

A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber

Is the adjective "child" modifying both of the following nouns ("child soldier/child suicide bomber"), or just the first ("child soldier/adult suicide bomber")?

I think it’s someone who bombs both child soldiers and suicides.

A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?

No. The Chauvin example is actually the wildly unlikely scenario. As it always has been.

1. Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.

Here are good links to multiple angles of the video. @self_made_human posted them downthread:

Angle 1

Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]

Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)

  1. Hard disagree on your assessment of the culpability of the shooter. When the car starts moving (i.e. the driver doesn't kill the engine and present their hands), this is pretty much brandishing a deadly weapon. At point blank, the cop is justified 100%. I've posted before about how people really overestimate the ability to "think rationally" in situations like this. You default to a lot of training / muscle memory / self-preservation instincts. Again, go watch some police bodycam videos on YouTube to understand how quick things can turn from ho-hum traffic stop to shots fired.

About ten or twelve years ago I was walking down the street and an older woman pulling out of a bank drive-thru bumped me with her car. Then she bumped me again after I banged on the hood and started yelling. I had a 4-year-old kid walking with me at the time, too. It's good to know I could have shot her in the face three times if I had been strapped.

  • -11

Unnecessary antagonism aside, this is actually a pretty good scissor statement.

Because my answer is an unqualified "Yes."

If someone hit me with a car twice, I would view that as 2x assault with a deadly weapon. In terms of the next course of action, reasonable people can disagree over whether or not they would flee or try to "de-escalate" (whatever the hell that means), but the justification for self-defense - up to and including lethal force - is now, in my mind, undoubtedly present.

I crave an America where every fender bender results in a fire fight.

It's not clear whether you're being sarcastic or not. I'm somewhat compelled to report this to the mods for being low effort and probably antagonistic, but I feel like they have better things to do.

If you want to actually engage with my argument, I'm here for it, pal.

I actually agree with you that getting intentionally double tapped by a car is a pretty serious threat to your life and health

I thought the mental image of my comment was amusing

I thought the mental image of my comment was amusing.

It is, but it's also a confusing non-sequitur, since the previous discussion was of a car's bumping a pedestrian, not a fender bender between two cars.

This, but unironically.

You were a police officer conducting a law enforcement action at a bank drive-thru with a 4-year-old-kid?

The last I checked the criminal laws police officers conducting law enforcement operations didn't get any special privileges regarding standards when lethal force is justified, but even assuming they did:

  1. This lady actually hit me. Not hard enough for it to matter, but she did make contact; there are nor arguments about whether if you look at which way the wheel was pointing you can divine if she was trying to steer towards me or go around or had the car in reverse or whatever.

  2. She hit me again after I yelled at her for hitting me and putting a kid in danger.

...and neither of those give you legal equivalency a law enforcement officer conducting legitimate law enforcement activities.

The last I checked the criminal laws police officers conducting law enforcement operations didn't get any special privileges regarding standards when lethal force is justified,

This begs three questions:

  1. When did you last check?

  2. How did you last check?

  3. Why did your check fail to find rules of engagement?

I think you mean @zoink instead of @self_made_human for who shared links to multiple angles of the video.

I am pleased that I have achieved a level of fame/notoriety where I don't even have to do the hard work myself.

@100ProofTollBooth I'm afraid I don't think I've added anything to the discussion on Mrs. Good. It was probably someone else.

self_made did share links as well.

Continuing downthread, there are actually a bunch of video links. Shame on me for not reading more before posting and the re-editing. But now, it's all a little messy, so I'm just going to send out a blanket "Great job, everyone. Terrrrrr-ific!"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=K9CJY5p0xz4

Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.

This seems to have collected the different angles at the beginning and then random coverage afterwards (didn't watch that far).

This is just the main video.

Is there any evidence she was at a protest or in the act of protesting? There's some evidence she wasn't.

We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.

I have an unverified video being shared around twitter that shows a supposed interview of a neighbour near the scene talking about seeing Renee actively engage in blocking ICE vehicles.

I traced it back to this GAB post, but can't find the wider interview that it was clipped from.

Edit: Got it; I traced it back to its source. There was an interview by local MPR photojournalist Ben Hovland with locals up on TikTok.

The full interview is here.

2nd Edit: Seems from the full clip that she was repeating information she received from 'another guy that was driving behind her'.

You should probably archive footage like that.

Do you know of any good tools to archive video? I know catbox is a good hosting site.

My first choice is to throw yt-dlp at it, if it fails I look at the network tab in the dev tools and pick either the largest media element or m3u files if any.

Thank you.

I have read that her wife was outside the car when this all happened. Presumably the wife was there for the protests.

I suppose it’s possible that Renee was coming to pick her wife up, which would explain why she might stop in a weird spot in the middle of the action.

Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer, or otherwise intentionally. The ex-husband quoted in news articles says she and her wife were both in the car after dropping off her kid to school. So it doesn't seem like "Wifey was at protest, Good just turned up to collect her".

Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer,

Reminds of the situation in Gaza with all kinds of Hamas operatives claiming to be "journalists."

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/08/renee-good-woman-killed-by-ice-agent-in-minneapolis-was-a-mother-poet-and-new-to-the-city

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Macklin Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.

I'm not sure how much credibility to give this semi-sourced story, but it seems to me like if she was involved in an organized protest the government probably knows what group it was by now, and there's going to be video all over the internet of her at this or other protests. It's not really the kind of thing that would be a mystery.

To say nothing of the footage that ICE definitely has that has not been released for some reason.

The more statements issued, the more confused I am.

If she was just trying to drive home with her new spouse after dropping off the kid at school, and she's new to the city, I could buy that "oops, turned down the wrong street and drove into the middle of a protest".

In that case, though, why was New Wifey outside the car? If this is "two women driving the wrong way by mistake", then both women should have been in the car when Good tried to park/turn/drive back.

From other places, I'm seeing them identify her as deliberately being there for the protest:

...Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison told NPR she was acting as “a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors.”

ELLISON: You know, these are some important legal questions that need to be determined. And I can tell you that there are a number of parallel prosecutorial authorities that could be employed here, including the county and the state and even the federal government if - but, you know, we're looking at the reality of - the Homeland Security secretary has already said, we did nothing wrong, even though there's been no investigation, which is really disturbing. You know, you would think that the Homeland Security secretary would be the first to say, let's suspend judgment and look into it. That's not what we saw. We saw the Homeland Security secretary defame, you know, Miss Good by calling her a domestic terrorist. She was anything but that. She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors. That's what she was doing at the moment of her death. And she was a poet. She was a mom. She was a daughter. And I'm deeply saddened by what happened to her and her family. And so I think that it is important for us to investigate this matter thoroughly. We need to keep our legal options open, and we must have transparency and accountability from the government.

I don't know what exactly a legal observer is or what they do, but both stories can't be true. She can't be just someone who got caught up in an event she had no idea about and there to observe ICE for the sake of immigrants.

Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.

Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.

It's not ironic; it was Ron Klain and Merrick Garland seeking legal cover to use the US domestic spying apparatus against political dissidents. Sulla never accomplishes his goals, he lays the groundwork for the populares to return with a vengeance.

Okay, but if this really was "innocent bystander got caught in the protest", why didn't she stop the car? Why be "fleeing the officer trying to arrest her"? Maybe she panicked, but that's a really bad decision as it turned out.

It's not that surprising she would panic though, the ICE officer strides towards her car and tries repeatedly to open her car door.

Thats only a reasonable response if she thought the ICE officer was an impersonator though...

I don't think it's reasonable, I think it's predictable.

We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.

My High School driving instructor would like to respectfully disagree with you.

Yesterday the narrative for Democrats was that she was a "Legal Observer", what that is I don't know.

Libs of TikTok

Direct to Rep. Ilhan Omar's Tweet.

The term "legal observer" was trademarked in the U.S. by the National Lawyers Guild, a longstanding radical activist group. I mostly remember them from Days of Rage, regarding them funding and otherwise supporting the Weather Underground. Searching around I can't find confirmation of whether she was actually a certified NLG Legal Observer or if it's other activists using the same terminology, as another comment pointed out even the ACLU uses the term. (And it looks like the trademark is lapsed.)

I got the impression “legal observer” wasn’t a job title, but a claim that she was observing the protest legally.

It's definitely not a job title, but I'm reminded of ACLU Legal Observers, where the point is to observe and document the legal interactions at a protest, either between protesters and police, or protesters and counter-protesters. In theory, they're supposed to specifically be separate from the protest even if they're associated with the protestors, though sometimes they get very hands-on.

That said, I can't find good or trustworthy information on the status here.

Apparently it can be kind of like a job title: https://www.nlg.org/massdefenseprogram/los/

Doesn't sound like a paying job, but the words do have meaning I guess...

That was my first thought too, but I think now that it means “person observing the legality (or lack thereof) of the officers.”

Yeah everyone seems to have made that assumption from all sides, but her family members have come forward and said she wasn't involved in any protests.

With all the cameras around, I'd think we'd have pretty concrete evidence if she was involved in any organized protest group. So far it's just politician statements.

It's a pretty dark scene here if she wasn't, @WhiningCoil might be right about this country.

I'm still hoping someone will put out a longer video that shows the lead up. All the footage I've seen so far is the same couple of videos that all begin seconds before the shooting (granted, it's entirely possible that's just when people started recording).

People here seem to be taking it as a given that she was trying to block ICE vehicles, but the footage we have doesn't actually support that. There are ICE vehicles on either side of her, and we see another vehicle pull past her before the confrontation. It is inference, but it looks more to me like ICE boxed her in rather than vice versa.

Depends on the layout of the street, right?

Man, don't ping me on this. There is nothing I can say that won't get me banned!

I kid, I kid.

Kind of.

It does bring me comfort though that I no longer need to say the things that will get me banned. You know.

I'm not trying to get you into trouble. Quite the opposite, this is strong bayesian evidence that you might be right. Initially I assumed that ICE was going after an immigrant, and the escaping immigrant was indifferent to driving at a cop and got shot in the process, and that seemed unfortunate but basically orderly to me. Then it came out that this was a middle aged white woman, but there were the allegations this was a protestor, which seems more like "bad situation all around."

But if it really is the case that this was an American citizen, driving down the street, trying to turn around, and got shot; and the response is as it has been. Then this is a pretty deep black pill for me. I hope it isn't the case.

Sorry, do you mind elaborating what you're talking about for the peanut gallery?

What is WhiningCoil right about? Are they pro or anti ICE?

I'm not angling for anyone to be banned (why would anyone be banned is another question I have) but this interaction has flown right over my head

What is WhiningCoil right about?

My learned friend in Kettlebells Mr. Coil has frequently expressed distress that his ideological enemies want him dead, and would celebrate his and his family's deaths simple because of who he was. Particularly around the Jay Jones controversy.

If this woman turns out not to have been involved in any protest actions, then the broad reaction from the right wing internet is pretty black pilling to me, in that people are celebrating the killing of a white American citizen because she looks like an ideological enemy.

But in this case it would be the "other side" celebrating her death no?

Jay Jones is a Dem, and anyone who's happy this lady was iced (hah) is presumably republican.

More comments

Defenders of Good seem to think she was part of the protest. That would be wild if not.

Not particularly. The information has been spotty from the beginning.

And anyway, protestors have a vested interest in it being bad for protestors to get shot, for obvious reasons. Protestors don't think it is better if she was an "innocent bystander" as they think protestors are definitionally innocent.

The only people interested in the distinction would be those, like me, whose opinions would change if she weren't protesting.

After big terrorist attacks, many groups claim credit to display impact and efficacy. Similarly, one can easily imagine relevant groups here claiming a martyr or presuming her involvement - it strengthens the besieged narrative too.

Actually, the fact she was being recorded by her partner surely blows that idea out of the water

More comments

This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

I guess that explains why he was so quick. She starts the car moving towards him, he instantly pulls his gun.

It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.

I don't think so. I don't think she even knew he was there; she was fleeing the OTHER officer, the one at her door trying to arrest her.

it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

More likely he just didn't want to get hit again.

Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.

I think if he hadn't shot her, he would have been struck by the car in pretty much the same way and she would have driven away. But he couldn't know that at the time. If she'd been meaning to hit him (and he hadn't shot her), she could have instead squared up better on him and killed him.

I don't think the driver was trying to hit the guy, but it doesn't matter too much because she did anyways. And she's not going to be able to do any interviews explaining her intent.

In terms of prosecution, another commenter said so below, but federal officers are generally immune from state charges, so we're not going to get another chauvin situation.

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