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A woman in Minneapolis has been killed in an altercation with ICE. I don’t really trust any of the narratives being spun up. Here are
twothree angles:Angle 1
Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]
Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)
This is actually a fairly discussed type of shooting. Law enforcement confronts a person in a vehicle, the LEO positions himself in front of the vehicle, the person in the vehicle drives forward, and the cop shoots the person. Generally, courts have found that this is a legitimate shoot. The idea being that a car can be as deadly a weapon as anything.
Those who are less inclined to give deference to law enforcement argue that fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence, and that usually in these situations the LEO has put himself in front of the vehicle.
I have a long history of discussing shooters in self-defense situations [1] [2] [3] and also one of being anti-LEO. However, I’m softer on the anti-LEO front in the sense that within the paradigm in which we exist, most people think the state should enforce laws, and that the state enforcing laws = violence.
The slippery slope for me: “Fleeing police shouldn’t be a death sentence”
“Resisting arrest shouldn’t be a death sentence”
“If you just resist hard enough, you should be able to get away with it”
People really try to divorce the violence from state action, but the state doesn’t exist without it.
The car drives in reverse as the ICE agent walks toward her door from the front of the car. It abruptly stops in reverse with its tires faced in the exact direction to hit this ICE agent. If the last moment of “stopped with angle of hitting agent” is set to 0 seconds and 0 milliseconds, there is 1 second and 5 milliseconds before the shot is fired. Within this 1 second, the driver changes the angle of the tires as they begin to accelerate, which narrowly prevents the officer from being run over by the driver. Cold, fatigued, and stressed, the officer has all of these concerns within a single second:
• Do they have a weapon? His eyes need to be on the driver through the windshield, because ICE agents have previously been shot and weapons have previously been brandished. This is normal policing: you take out your weapon when someone belligerently refuses to listen to orders.
• Do I have my weapon out and ready? He needs to get his weapon out and aim toward the driver in case she has a weapon, which is normal police work.
• Is she going to hit me? It looks like she is, but my attention is not on the split-second angle turn of her tire, but on whether she has a weapon.
The shot appears to be fired just as the officer is hit by the side of the vehicle, though the officer probably had no idea that the driver intended to swerve out of the way in the last milliseconds so that it would simply brush against him, rather than giving him life-altering injuries which he doesn’t deserve (like paralysis). A reasonable person would infer that an accelerating driver with its tires angled toward you, and who sees you, is not going to serve away right at the exact moment to avoid life-altering injuries. If this inference is correct, then we are not discussing whether lethal force is justified over a trivial injury but over a serious injury or death.
IMHO we are left with these possibilities:
Never allow police to stand in front of a vehicle. I have no idea what the discussion on this would look like. If standing in front of a vehicle is helpful in determining whether a driver is reaching for a weapon, then this would be a complicated determination.
Tell police to do a barrel roll away as soon as they see a car beginning to move in any direction. I guess they can do that. But that interferes with safety per above. This officer could have jumped out of the way when she reversed, but did he know that she was about to accelerate toward him? This would require a change in policing strategy, so it can’t be blamed on this sole officer but the whole of society who elects lawmakers and so forth.
Require police to accept probable but not certain life-altering injuries in their line of work. This seems unreasonable and unethical.
Tell people to obey orders and not accelerate toward a human being in front of them.
Someone might say, “were I the officer I would have used my split second reaction time to get out of the way”. But for you, this event would put you in a hyper-vigilant and high adrenaline state of heightened attention. For the officer, this is simply one of the 40 hours of monotonous work that he must do every day. You can’t compare your state to his; you should compare his state to the periods of low or moderate attention that you sustain in your own occupational hours.
Let's say he thought she was going to hit him. Why does that mean he should have shot her? It didn't prevent him from being hit. It couldn't have unless he did it before she started moving, but surely you're not saying he can pre-emptively shoot her in case she starts driving towards him. The argument seems to be that, once she started driving towards him, then he was sufficiently threatened that he was justified in shooting her. But at that point, it is not at all reasonable to think shooting her can prevent her from shooting him.
So that just leaves the possibility that she has a weapon. But at no point did he have any reason to suspect that she did have a weapon. He only thought she might because anyone might. And doesn't it become much less likely that she is going to shoot him once she's driving? Now he's a moving target and she is a vehicle to operate while shooting him. It seems very unlikely. If he can shoot her in this scenario, he can shoot anyone disobeying police orders.
And why the time constraint apply here? He has one second until what, exactly? Until the car reaches him. But that is how much time he has to decide whether to shoot her to prevent her from hitting him with the car. It doesn't apply to the weapon concern. You don't just immediately shoot every non-cooperative person because you have time to determine whether he's armed.
For either concern, why is he standing in front of the car? Why is he standing in front of a moving car if he's worried she'll him? Why is he standing front of someone who might have a gun?
So the police officer solves this by creating a situation where he's likely to have to kill her because he isn't going to immediately find out whether she's armed. You said he drew his weapon because she wasn't co-operative. If she isn't co-operative, why not expect that she'll drive away? Why isn't this far more likely than that she's armed?
The trade off here just doesn't make any sense. The police officer is deciding to do something that will probably result in him killing her to gain the slightest bit of information about the probability of her having gun.
Even if we're only concerned about the police officer's safety, why is the supposedly substantial risk he gets run over by the car worth the tiny risk that she's going to shoot him and he's going to prevent that by getting in front of her and getting a better look at her?
I think he probably did know, because he made no attempt to get out of the way. It's possible he just had bad judgment and thought the right move to being run over by a large SUV was to shoot the driver when it was already in motion, but I think it's more likely he noticed it turning and understood he had time to get out of the way. He's actually leaning to his left and the moment he fires his first shot, seemingly to maintain his line of sight so that he could shoot her.
I think the solution to this is simple. No, don't stand in front of vehicles, especially if you think they might try to run you over, and definitely don't try to shoot someone if they do try to drive towards you. Just get out of the way.
OK, but he needs to be trained for this. If his instinct is to draw his gun and he doesn't have sufficient training to know what to do once his gun is drawn, that's a serious problem. The two key decisions he made which he should have consciously avoided if he didn't think he was mentally prepared for this situation were positioning himself in front of the vehicle of a non-cooperating suspect and drawing his gun. Maybe the split second decision once in that situation is tough, but then don't put yourself in that situation.
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