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Notes -
After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:
This iceman was hit by a different car previously.
The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.
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.
it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.
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?
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.
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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 distances involved.
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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.
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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.
And that is the problem with echo chambers, no? For all they can tell, it is the overwhelming majority that supports their actions, at least within one or two degrees of separation of their social circles.
Yes, sorry, that should've been written more as independent clauses.
A better way to phrase it would be something like: When you are protesting, especially when you are breaking laws, you should expect to be arrested for it; if you are annoying or otherwise not supported by the majority, this goes doubly.
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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
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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What an interesting question. What do you see as the implications of that statement being either true or false?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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