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If the choice is between a potential armed standoff where someone might be killed (and almost certainly won't be) and definitely killing her, definitely killing her seems like the much worse choice. It has the added benefit of not forcing a split-second decision. Remember, we're talking about someone who it appears didn't do anything other than block a lane of traffic. Would an armed standoff have been worth doing to arrest her? I don't see why they can't charge her and just wait until there is a safe opportunity to arrest her. It doesn't have to be immediate. It doesn't have to be that day or that week. Nothing about this was so serious and urgent that anyone's life had to be put at risk. This wasn't a live shooter, it was a middle-aged woman blocking a lane on a quiet residential street.
OK, I see the second sentence wasn't clear enough for you. In these high-pressure situations, you should expect officers to be running off their training and previous experience, and their training is about minimizing risks to themselves and the public across a wide set of situations, many of which are more serious threats than some lady in a car (in fact, the officer had previously been hit and dragged by a suspect in a vehicle). I'll also note that, generally, and though it's off-frame in the shooting videos, a protest in the middle of a residential street generally makes it less "quiet" at the time.
Shooting her didn't minimize the risk to themselves and to the public. It increased it dramatically (evidenced by the fact that it resulted in someone's death). Police, including ICE, are specifically trained not to do this.
I didn't know there was any protest going on. I didn't see that in any of the videos. But that just strengthens my point which is that she was not really blocking traffic, making her offence less serious.
This is all a bit moot now that we have bodycam footage showing that the officer was walking across the front of the car to get to the other side, and the driver looked straight at the officer while accelerating. I assume that "don't ever walk across the front of a car in case they suddenly try to run you over/knock you out of the way" isn't something we can realistically ask of police.
What does this even mean? Police are trained not to shoot people? Yes, they're trained not to shoot people outside of particular circumstances where that person is posing a danger to others, which she was. Your previous argument was that the officer unnecessarily put her in a position to cause that danger.
The protest (news reporting on this seems terrible, but seems like a spontaneous thing in response to an ICE arrest) was down the road and she was blocking one of the routes out. It's not "blocking traffic" like some highway sit-in, it's trying to block the officers' route out of the protest. Standing in front of the car or not, they had every right and reason to either get her to move or to detain her on the spot.
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