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Notes -
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.
My takes:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Approximately nobody is going to interpret this except through a maximally partisan lense. Our cold civil war gets a little hotter.
The car was already moving when decided to walk in front of it, stop and then pull out his gun. His decision to shoot her not only had no chance of actually protecting himself from being run over, it made increased the risk to himself because he could have just kept walking been out of the way. She almost certainly either didn't know he was there when she started driving forward or expected him to keep walking to her left and not suddenly stop in front of her just as she was about to take off.
This makes it all the more absurd that he decided to stand in front her car to try to stop her from leaving.
Has the just-released cell phone video of the interaction changed your mind about any of this?
It clearly contradicts what you said, e.g. "The car was already moving when decided to walk in front of it, stop and then pull out his gun."
It doesn't contradict that. I really get the impression many of the people in this thread haven't seen all of the videos, particularly the one shot from the other side of the street where you can see the front of the car. It's hard to tell what the car is doing from the cell phone video. But in the other video, it is perfectly clear when the car starts moving.
The one thing the cell phone video changed my mind about was how likely it was that she saw him. I was quite surprised about where she was looking while backing up. I thought it was very odd that she looked up while backing up instead of backwards or at the back-up camera. So I do think it's much more likely she knew he was in front of the car before she started driving forward.
However, she was focused on backing up and was probably glancing up at the rear view mirror, so I can imagine how she might have not really noticed him or if she had, how she could have failed to notice where he stopped walking while she was looking away (I think at the side view mirror).
This does make it more likely that she was trying to hit him, but I still think it wasn't very likely, especially not likely that she was trying to seriously injure him. Someone suggested that she might have been trying to gently tap him, which would certainly have been reckless. That's much more believable.
The doesn't undermine many of the other key facts, such as the fact that he unnecessarily and recklessly placed himself in danger seemingly to give himself an excuse to shoot her should she try to run away. Although it's quite possible he was simply being grossly negligent as to the likelihood she would try to escape.
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