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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20766 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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A woman in Minneapolis has been killed in an altercation with ICE. I don’t really trust any of the narratives being spun up. Here are two three angles:

Angle 1

Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]

Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)

This is actually a fairly discussed type of shooting. Law enforcement confronts a person in a vehicle, the LEO positions himself in front of the vehicle, the person in the vehicle drives forward, and the cop shoots the person. Generally, courts have found that this is a legitimate shoot. The idea being that a car can be as deadly a weapon as anything.

Those who are less inclined to give deference to law enforcement argue that fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence, and that usually in these situations the LEO has put himself in front of the vehicle.

I have a long history of discussing shooters in self-defense situations [1] [2] [3] and also one of being anti-LEO. However, I’m softer on the anti-LEO front in the sense that within the paradigm in which we exist, most people think the state should enforce laws, and that the state enforcing laws = violence.

The slippery slope for me: “Fleeing police shouldn’t be a death sentence”

“Resisting arrest shouldn’t be a death sentence”

“If you just resist hard enough, you should be able to get away with it”

People really try to divorce the violence from state action, but the state doesn’t exist without it.

My takes:

  1. Almost certainly going to be called legally justified. She was accelerating her car towards him at close range; from his perspective (which is the one that matters for legal purposes) it was a clear deadly threat, plus he's a cop so he gets extra leeway for shooting people. If he was a civilian it'd be less clear cut, but I'm 95% sure it gets called legal and that's the call I'd make if i was on the jury, cop or not.

  2. In retrospect an unnecessary shoot, you can tell by watching her wheels she wasn't trying to hit him though she did glance him. He could have probably jumped out of the way, but it'd be risky if she was trying to hit him. I don't think it's reasonable to expect cops to engage in that kind of self-risk to avoid shooting people, but I think cops should aspire to as a matter of personal virtue.

  3. As almost always, she gets major culpability here for A)being in this situation in the first place B)not just complying C)Trying to flee in a way that could obviously be read as a deadly threat. DHS says she was attacking agents/their vehicles beforehand, idk if true but i'd bet it is; it's vanishingly unlikely this happens without her deliberately engaging against the agents. I'm not saying she deserved to die; I'm saying that she had numerous obvious off ramps from this situation she didn't take and therefore is significantly responsible for her own death. Sort of like a motorcyclist who's doing 100mph on a city street a tshirt and shorts who then has a car do an illegal U-turn in front of them, hits it, and dies: they might not be technically at fault for the specific accident but they're at fault for being in a situation where it could happen.

  4. I think that the blue media and politicians are also majorly at fault here. They have been encouraging people to interfere with ICE, and encouraging people to interfere with law enforcement will almost inevitably get people hurt and killed. She got memed into this and died for it.

  5. Approximately nobody is going to interpret this except through a maximally partisan lense. Our cold civil war gets a little hotter.

I'm not claiming to know exactly what legal standard applies in this case, but normally, when there's a threat, you have a duty to flee. You do not have the right to kill someone unless necessary to protect yourself from serious injury or death. The cop easily got out of the way and was just barely in the way to begin with. He was standing in front of the corner of the car. The car was not going fast enough to seriously injury him and the wheels were turned. She did not go straight forward. She was clearly trying to get away, not run him over. The cop fired a second time from the side when he was well clear of the car and there was no risk to anyone.

Given that the cop deliberately created a dangerous situation by standing in front of the car, I do think it is entirely reasonable for him to bear the responsibility of accurately determining the risk of the situation he put himself in.

She may bear responsibility for putting herself in that situation, but it's just a fact that death is far too severe a consequence for what is a fairly minor offence. The police should not be creating situations with people they know aren't likely to be cooperative where they're likely to do something the police are going to interpret as a sufficiently serious threat that they will respond to it with deadly force.

It does some seem like American police can get away with almost anything. They get a shocking level of deference. It seems like one of those cases where the cop was just looking for an excuse to kill someone.

The common attitude seems to be that if there is even the slightest risk to a police officer, the officer has the right to kill the person posing that risk. Many people, including me, think that killing someone should only be done when absolutely necessary, such as when severe injury or death is likely, not just a remote possibility, and that the police cannot both be unnecessarily contributing to the creation of a situation that is dangerous to them and be reacting to that danger with deadly force.

The cop had no reason to stand in front of that vehicle unless he was absolutely sure she would not run him over, and he should not have shot her unless he thought it was very likely that she would run him over. He should not be allowed to kill her for his lack of judgment, even if her own bad behaviour also contributed. Summary execution should not be the sentence for obstruction of justice unless absolutely necessary. The police are far too cavalier about ending people's lives.

One final point, shooting her accomplished absolutely nothing. After she was shot, the vehicle continued until it hit a parked car. If ending her life didn't even accomplish the goal of protecting the officer, what possible justification could there be?

  • -14

I'm not claiming to know exactly what legal standard applies in this case, but normally, when there's a threat, you have a duty to flee.

This depends on the state. But even in states like Minnesota where you have a duty to retreat

  1. It typically does not apply to police officers in the course of their duty

  2. Fleeing has to be safely possible. Not likely to be the case when a car is aimed at you and accelerating towards you.

  1. I don't know the law, but there must be some limits on what the police can do to put themselves into dangerous situations. For example, a police officer cannot leap into the path of a vehicle driving down the road and shoot the law-abiding driver. The only reason I can think of that the duty to flee would not apply to a police officer is that they must remain present to ensure the safety of others. Police are not supposed to stand in front of cars to try to stop them. I would be surprised if that didn't somehow undermine the self-defence argument. No part of what he did contributed to anyone's safety. Everyone would have been better off with him not in front of the vehicle. Shooting her didn't even help to stop the car. Had he remained in front of the car, he still would been hit.

  2. Fleeing was safely possible. We know this because he safely fled, even after delaying his attempt to do so until the very last second, even leaning over the hood to ensure he got a good shot of her face. I can see how he might not have realized in the split second between the car moving and when he fired, but the car was not aimed at him nor accelerating towards him. It began aimed at him and turned away from him. He was clear of the car when he took his first shot.

I don't know the law, but there must be some limits on what the police can do to put themselves into dangerous situations.

This hasn't yet gotten a definitive answer from the courts.

We do not address here the different question [officer, defendant, appellee] Felix raises about use-of-force cases: whether or how an officer’s own “creation of a dangerous situation” factors into the reasonableness analysis. As in another of our recent Fourth Amendment cases, that issue is not properly before us. The courts below never confronted the issue, precisely because their inquiry was so time-bound. In looking at only the two seconds before the shot, they excluded from view any actions of the officer that allegedly created the danger necessitating deadly force. So, to use the obvious example, the courts below did not address the relevance, if any, of Felix stepping onto the doorsill of [suspect, plaintiff, appellant] Barnes’s car. And because they never considered that issue, it was not the basis of the petition for certiorari. The question presented to us was one of timing alone: whether to look only at the encounter’s final two seconds, or also to consider earlier events serving to put those seconds in context.

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