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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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New footage of ICE shooter

Forgive another high-level post but the body cam (or cell phone?) footage of the cop who shot has been released by AlphaNews and this may significantly change perceptions of what happened (to those willing to have perceptions changed):

https://x.com/alphanews/status/2009679932289626385?s=46

To my eyes it appears that:

  • The ICE agent is clearly hit by her car and goes down

  • The ICE agent was not standing in front of her car but walking from one side to another

  • The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)

  • Perhaps most importantly, but maybe most open to interpretation, it appears to me that the driver looks directly at the ICE agent before driving forward. From this bodycam angle, her face is clearly shown looking directly ahead where the officer is seconds before she moves her car forward.

I suppose a lot of new interpretations are possible, but to me this video footage clearly debunks several going interpretations I have seen proposed. At the very least, maybe reasonable people can agree that the cop did not shoot the driver in cold blood from the side window.

I would also not be surprised to see the idea spread that this new video is AI.

Edit: per corrections from others below, this is not bodycam but cell phone footage (my mistake as it’s clearly even labeled as such) and this explains why it tumbles at the end of the video. Thanks!

The takes really are coming from every direction.

@LiberalRetvrn [Link]

Why was he filming with his cell phone if he felt she was an imminent threat?

@Gillitrut [Link]

Dude literally switched his phone from the right hand to the left, just before the lunch comment, so it would be easier to draw and shoot.

So I'm not just calling out one side. What's the best evidence that Renee Good's vehicle actually made contact with Jonathan Ross? This one isn't super controversial but what's the solid evidence that the women filming is Renee Good's wife?

What's the best evidence that Renee Good's vehicle actually made contact with Jonathan Ross?

In one video you see Ross lean forward, then the car drives forward, then he suddenly moves backwards. Biomechanically, a person can’t step back that fast from that position. Some other object must have provided the backwards force.

Also, listening closely to the cellphone video, you hear four pops, but only three shots were fired. The additional pop is the impact.

The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)

I feel like this particular line of argumentation was only held by the most deliberately unaware and misinformed on the issue. Like at the very least why was the wife walking around outside of the vehicle with her camera out if this was a completely random uninvolved set of people.

X comment: “Am I high or is that a giant T-Rex?!?”

And yes, there is a life sized T-Rex.

Right around the 0:24 mark. It's on a lawn / driveway in the background.

"Ok, there are several videos and several angles. Did you see the one with the big T-Rex at 0:24?" gets this from 9/10 scissor situation to 9.85/10.

It actually did change my opinion. Lesbians who come out later in life often get themselves into trouble when they start experimenting with aggression. They didn't learn appropriate boundaries when they were small and relatively harmless.

It looks to me like she wanted to do an intimidating bad ass peel out like you'd see in a movie. But she aimed poorly, terrified the officer, and got shot.

A twelve year old with a dirt bike can try that, a grown adult driving an SUV really can't.

It looks to me like she wanted to do an intimidating bad ass peel out like you'd see in a movie.

I couldn't quite put my finger on what was happening, but I think this is it. No idea about the Lesbian stuff, but you can practically see her think, "This is gonna be so fucking sick. I hope somebody is filming."

Wasn't her partner's videos one of the earlier released and claimed as evidence against the ICE? I.e., a pre-staged filmer for a deliberage ICE obstruction stunt?

As far as I'm aware her partner's angle on the actual escape attempt hasn't been released. One of the earlier clips was from somebody to the direct left of the partner who seemed to be 'legal observing' in the same way.

She was an agitator trying to cause trouble and he was a stressed out ICE agent dealing with a hostile crowd. When threatened with the possibility of arrest for obstructing law enforcement, she hit the gas. Why? Don't know, though someone (her wife?) yelled at her to drive, so maybe it was just that. She was not attempting to kill or assault the ICE agent and may not have even realized that she would hit him. The ICE agent, meanwhile, was not just idly standing in front of her vehicle, but rather walking around it when she started to move. He was likely especially concerned about being hit and dragged by the vehicle, since it had happened to him once already. She did strike him, but not in a manner which was seriously life threatening, but in that split second the ICE agent had the possibly unreasonable belief that his life was in danger and his reflexes did the rest.

Had the vehicle been moving a little faster or had made a more direct impact, then his life might really have been in danger. Had he been two more steps to the side then she would have missed him entirely and would not have been shot. These interactions presumably happen frequently for ICE, but the vast majority of the time people get lucky and nobody gets seriously hurt. Although she was violating the law and creating a dangerous situation, she obviously did not deserve to die and it's a genuine tragedy that she did. She should not have been there and the people who organize these "protests" need to be stopped. If the ICE agent could reload a previous save game and try again, then I'm pretty sure he would not to pull the trigger.

He was not a sadistic murderer and she was not a dangerous terrorist attempting to murder ICE agents. Both of them probably privately fantasized about lethal violence against the other side.

The broader issue is that many parts of the country appear to not want to be subject to immigration law and are in open defiance against it.

The broader issue is that many parts of the country appear to not want to be subject to immigration law and are in open defiance against it.

I've heard of restaurants refusing service to ICE agents too.

To quote my earlier post:

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 seen those who want to give the least amount of deference to law enforcement assert that LEOs will place themselves in front of vehicles not just "stupidly" to keep the suspect from escaping, but to manufacture the opportunity to kill the suspect. I think this vantage gives strong evidence that there is little evidence that Jonathan Ross was attempting that. He is filming as he circles the car, he is only in front of the car for a relatively short amount of time, and Ross's position in front of the car is as much Renee Good's doing because she backed up as it is his doing.

I have seen those who want to give the least amount of deference to law enforcement assert that LEOs will place themselves in front of vehicles not just "stupidly" to keep the suspect from escaping, but to manufacture the opportunity to kill the suspect.

I don't care much whether it's deliberate. A practice that without really good reason creates a legal excuse for you to shoot someone who is not otherwise committing a shoot-worthy offense is a bad practice. And it remains so even if the practice was created organically and nobody consciously said "let's do this so we get to shoot the suspect".

Dude literally switched his phone from the right hand to the left, just before the lunch comment, so it would be easier to draw and shoot.

  • -15

One, not relevant to the point I'm making.

Two, keeping your weapon hand free is one of the most basic LEO practices probably since the concept of LEO and the concept of wearing a weapon came into existence.

Or he had to scratch his nose. The number of Sherlocks in this week's roundup is astonishing.

Someone in the previous comment tree about this incident said that politicians that let people feel like it was okay to interfere with ICE operations are the most to blame for this and this video is clear proof. She's a middle aged mother of multiple children that she just allegedly dropped off, with a dog in her car, and her first thought when seeing ICE is to get right in the middle of everything with a shit eating grin. Zero survival skills, feeling invincible, fueled by propaganda of 'modern day gestapo' disappearing your mexican neighbor for no reason at all. It's just sad

I don’t understand the folks still taking about her tires turning. You have to take this video in with the next most recent one over the fence. There are agents surrounding her on multiple sides including one approaching on the other side of the car.

It is very unlikely she was trying to kill anyone. But it is very clear she was ok to plow through a group of agents without respect to their individual positions. She was recklessly fleeing a lawful arrest and put her getaway above the pedestrians she was plowing through. And she did this in a cold calm manner, not in some confused panic

Noem mentioned this specific office had been hit and dragged by a vehicle in July. I also saw some number (forgot where) that there have been double digit increases in officers being attacked with vehicles. If I learned that was untrue it might move my needle, but frankly, I'm a bit sympathetic to the position, "people have been trying to kill me with their cars, I'm not going to wait around to get killed next time." I find myself very unsympathetic to the, "stop ICE by any means necessary," crew. I get the ICE has been juiced up and have become something they weren't before. I don't feel particularly comfortable with the 'fear' strategy, but I get why it's effective. What really bothers me is a) the reporting on the left that the handful of possibly wrong arrests and deportations is the norm--specifically amping up the fear and b) the idea that some people are so certain about what's happening they are literally ready to lay down their lives. I just can't get into the mindset of people who lack the epistemic humility to wonder, "am I sure I know what's happening here?" Maybe I'm wrong, but it's always been my biggest issue with protesters--how are they so certain?

This footage shows even more clearly to me that the ICE employee was at least negligent. Why was he filming with his cell phone if he felt she was an imminent threat? Why was he wandering around to the front of the car? Everyone seemed fairly calm until the other ICE employee starts yelling "get out of the fucking car" and charging up to the drivers' side door. I didn't hear the phrase "you're under arrest" anywhere in the video.

If ICE employees want to be treated like cops, maybe they should act more like cops. Wear proper body cameras instead of using a cell phone, have their faces visible, and identify their name and badge number when asked. Then maybe people would feel that it's safe to surrender when "arrested" by them.

  • -23

Why was he filming with his cell phone if he felt she was an imminent threat?

This is incredibly obtuse and probably a strawman.

Nobody, anywhere, is saying he regarded her as an imminent threat at that moment, when her car was in park and she was using it as a stationary barricade. At that moment she was an obstacle, not a threat, which is why he feels safe walking around it.

And then she shifted her car into drive and drove it directly into a police officer.

Somewhere around this moment is when he started regarding her as an imminent threat, which is why this is when he pulled out his firearm, rather than earlier.

If ICE employees want to be treated like cops, maybe they should act more like cops. Wear proper body cameras instead of using a cell phone, have their faces visible, and identify their name and badge number when asked. Then maybe people would feel that it's safe to surrender when "arrested" by them.

I agree with you 100% on the bodycams.

As for the rest, we've talked about this previously and why its a non-starter. The protestors are actively trying to dox and threaten the ICE agents.

He obviously didn’t feel she was a threat until she rammed him with her car. Why do you pretend not to understand this? Who do you think you’re convincing with this act?

Well I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he didn't think she was a threat, it's even worse that his first reaction was to start blasting.

  • -25

it's even worse that his first reaction was to start blasting.

why?

I didn't hear the phrase "you're under arrest" anywhere in the video.

It sounds like you have made up your mind and will never be pleased. She hit him with her car and you’re arguing that some other conduct that’s not on video we can never know the truth of is probably exculpatory context

No, I'm judging purely based on the video. I saw nothing in the video that made it clear the ICE employees were putting her under arrest. I don't see how someone can be "resisting arrest" unless they're aware they are being arrested. All I saw was a guy in a mask jumping out of an unmarked vehicle and running toward her, yelling "get out of the fucking car". In that situation it seems reasonable to fear for one's life. Why does the ICE employee have the right to self-defense but an American citizen on a public street doesn't have the right to flee?

  • -26

I don't see how someone can be "resisting arrest" unless they're aware they are being arrested.

I don’t understand your thinking here. If a cop would stop you and tell you to get out of your car, do you think you could just floor it and flee because they didn’t say you are under arrest?

All I saw was a guy in a mask jumping out of an unmarked vehicle and running toward her …. In that situation it seems reasonable to fear for one's life.

That may be reasonable if someone is startled and wondering if brazilian street gangsters are carjacking them, but it is not what is happening in the video. She, her partner and the bystanders know exactly who the ICE officers are and she is smiling condescendingly and cracking jokes at them. There is neither panic nor fear, just smugness and derision. She is not fleeing out of panic, but because she is flippantly taking it as a game and not taking the situation serious.

There is neither panic nor fear, just smugness and derision.

Right, and then the other ICE employee started charging at her, and she feared for her life. I would be scared too if some guy dressed like a muslim terrorist started trying to drag me out of my car. For all she knew, these were just a group of Trump supporters pretending to be ICE.

  • -30

This is just an absurd inference (I think it’s trolling). There are clear as day other ICE agents there. Is she really afraid that some vigilante will snatch her when literally LEO is right there?

Whatever it is, it isn't trolling. Progressives in the area view ICE as Trump's personal thugs here to snatch dissidents, not LEO here to enforce laws.

That’s so untethered from reality

More comments

Watch the video again in 0.25x speed: She is grinning when she tries to drive away. I grant that this was a stressful/adrenaline situation, but not because she was scared but because this was an exciting adventure for her. She thought herself as a heroine in the coming Instagram story and was thrilled to try to escape.

Anyway, this is unimportant. But if you give her such a wide leeway in your theory of mind, I wonder why you don’t do that for the officer? You imagine she was scared shitless and in panic as a (in her mind) terrorist clad Trump thug stormed onto her, but your imagination stops short of the officer having an instinctive fight response when a (in his mind) crazy belligerent bitch hits him with her SUV?

I don't sympathize with the ICE employee because he is being paid to deal with whatever stress this job causes him. If he can't handle it without taking out his feelings on innocent people, he should just quit. It's a pointless job anyway, so nothing would be lost. I also can't imagine stepping in front of a running car, and my first instinct if said car were approaching me would be to jump out of the way, not draw my ccw. His actions make me think he actually wasn't in fear for his life, because shooting the driver didn't change anything about the momentum of the car.

I also can't imagine stepping in front of a running car

... What do you do at crosswalks?

Walking in front of cars that, while running, are currently stopped isn't actually dangerous in most situations, and most(?) everyone does it all the time. It was a mistake in this instance, obviously, but I hardly think it proves the officer doesn't believe getting run over is dangerous(? Is that really your argument?), just that he didn't think she'd suddenly accelerate.

His actions make me think he actually wasn't in fear for his life, because shooting the driver didn't change anything about the momentum of the car.

That is irrelevant. Let's say a bad guy has his gun pointed at you, and you pull out your own gun (this is called drawing from the drop). Is that likely to change anything about the bad guy? No (you are highly likely to get shot and die). Does that mean you weren't in fear of your own life? Obviously you still were.

Right, and then the other ICE employee started charging at her, and she feared for her life. I would be scared too if some guy dressed like a muslim terrorist started trying to drag me out of my car. For all she knew, these were just a group of Trump supporters pretending to be ICE.

Now you are inventing Jussie-Smollet like conspiracy theories to explain this woman's conduct. Just why? Its pretty simple what happened. A lady got in her car with the intent to disrupt ICE activity. She was so doing so. She then made a fatal error by accelerating her car and hitting a federal agent who was seemingly a bit trigger happy given his previous hostile experiences with vehicles hitting him.

There's no need to go into good/bad shoot, it was a meh shoot onto a person who created the situation with their intentional lawless activity.

It is exhausting that “sort by controversial” posts garner the most replies and I am not sure LiberalRetvrn is not trolling. So I want to say I agree with your take and both can be true: She sadly misjudged the situation and acted careless and the officer was trigger happy.

I've never claimed that she made a smart self-preserving decision by participating in civil disobedience against ICE. That's what makes her a hero in my opinion, she sacrificed herself (possibly unintentionally) to resist federal overreach and the police state. And I want her killer to be punished.

I dont think states should be able to opt out of immigration law because they make them feel bad anymore than I can opt out of tax law because I dont like coughing up 45% of my check to DC.

Unless you disagree with that notion there is no case for this being federal overreach or a police state action.

More comments

She's not under arrest. She is being given lawful orders and potentially being detained. These can lead up to an arrest depending on the circumstances.

If the police tell you to stop, or get out of the car, you have to obry, even if you've done nothing wrong.

And there is zero chance that she didn't know those were federal agents. She specifically went out her way to follow and disrupt ice. That's the only reason she was there.

She was a left wing activist chasing ICE in her car to participate in resistance. You could argue she was naive about how this would escalate and maybe rational to fear for her life. (Note that, as far as captured on video, she did not appear to fear for her life.) But she wasn’t ignorant about who these armed men were when she floored the accelerator

Ah yes, so afraid of ICE that their defense mechanisms of smugging to the agents and sincerely recommending a lunch schedule were triggered.

Now that we've learned what has (somehow and bizarrely) been affirmed for you from this video, could you tell us if it contradicted any of your prior take on the situation?

could you tell us if it contradicted any of your prior take on the situation?

I didn't realize that things were so calm before the second ICE employee charged in yelling obscenities at the woman. I'm now shifting some of the blame over to him. I had assumed based on the way he approached that the situation was already tense.

I'm also surprised that the guy who shot her was filming with his cell phone rather than having an official body camera. Unless he did also have a body camera, and was just filming to be petty because the citizens were filming him. Which would be very unprofessional.

  • -23

"yelling obscenities" is flatly false, both literally and in spirit.

Firstly, as you're fully aware, he was speaking, not yelling. You can tell by contrasting the volume of his voice with the volume of the protesters yelling around him.

Secondly, I'm pretty sure he says:

  • "Get out of the car"
  • "Get out of the fucking car"
  • "Get out of the car"

So, you've decided that the single calmly-spoken obscenity "fucking" is enough to turn his entire approach into "yelling obscenities".

You've also, I assume, watched the entire preceding encounter, where the wife insults and and aggro's him repeatedly. You've chosen to characterise this as "calm".

You understand that you're saying things that are straightforwardly untrue, right?

Given that the other videos showed the cars wheel were fully turned, I don't think she was deliberately trying to run him down. I think she was trying to recklessly and illegally trying to escape police detainment, and between the panic and bad driving and recklessness, may have clipped the officer with her car. This is downstream of her probably being misinformed that ICE had no ability to arrest her. As I understand it, ICE cannot serve arrest warrants for citizens, but if citizens are illegally obstructing ICE operations they ICE does have the power to arrest. So she and her GF thought they could smirk and harass and insult and obstruct and then drive off with no consequences.

I think the shooting is legally justified, but I wouldn't want that officer hired to be my local beat cop. He was more careless with his positioning and more trigger happy than he had to be.

I think the shooting is legally justified, but I wouldn't want that officer hired to be my local beat cop. He was more careless with his positioning and more trigger happy than he had to be.

Yeah I think given this encounter and his recent history being dragged by a car, he's unlucky at best and should probably be transferred to a desk or something.

Perhaps every officer who fires their gun should just be retired from working on the street. It's certainly rare enough.

he's unlucky at best

Luck has nothing to do with it. Democrats are telling their voters to do this.. And their PD's and DA's broadly let them get away with it too.

I am inclined to agree with this characterization, though I think there are still many unknowns. The direction of the wheels is likely the clearest circumstantial indicator of her intent. It's where she wanted to "go." At the time of acceleration, her wheels were in the process of turning right, seemingly to escape the stop. In my view, this was to complete the K-turn motion that she began with her short reverse, and leave the scene. Simultaneously, the officer was crossing in front of the vehicle, to her left. If she wanted to ram the officer, you would expect her to begin turning left at some point to track the officer's movement, but there is no indication of this. Thus, I'm inclined to believe that she had minimal intent to harm, and any harm was accidental or hasty. There's even a moment earlier in the footage where the officer stands right in front of her car, and she opts not to drive into him. Hardly some Democrat wet-dream vigilante crime. She would have to be basically brain dead to try and harm an officer with passengers and a pet in the car, and even the most antisocial irrational people I know would never put their pets in harm's way. I blame the folks egging her on.

Whether or not the shooting was legal or justified based on the officer's perception, that's a different question. But I think this detail in particular exonerates Good from the charge of wanting to injure the officer.

If I wanted to be maximally uncharitable about her motives, I would say, (I do not actually believe this) her wheels are straight at the moment she starts accelerating, but she turns to avoid the officer when she sees his gun and realizes it's a bad idea to try to run him over.

Again I don't actually believe this, but if I probably would if I was motivated to portray her as evil.

Let’s pose a question. If she was on BlueSky and watching a twitter video of the incident of a different leftist driving with everything being the same except the officer doesn’t shoot. In this case the officer is hit and let’s say one of his lefts is mangled and eventually amputated?

My guess is she would think something like “the officer got what he deserved”. If she was on a jury of the driver charged with aggravated assault she probably wouldn’t convict.

While I don’t think tried to kill the officer — I also don’t think she had any concern if she did hurt the officer while evading arrest. In her mind the officer is subhuman and illegitimate so she doesn’t care much about what happens to them.

My gut says this is solidly in the category of didn’t try to kill but had zero concern about the officers safety. In many cases that ends up getting people killed.

I don't think this actually matters; her character doesn't determine whether it was a good shoot, what matters is whether the situation is one in which self defense an officer shooting an individual was permissible.

To be clear, I think it's obviously met here, even if all of the following are granted (and I don't necessarily agree they all were):

  1. The ICE officer was in front of the car deliberately, in an attempt to detain the individual in question.
  2. The woman was attempting to flee from the situation, not hit the officer.

Even given all that, the death of the woman is a tragedy - a tragedy of her own making, but still a tragedy. Baying for the blood of your enemies is something that reflects a poor character, and is corrosive to your soul. Them calling for your blood is a reflection of how horrible they are - don't justify it by being the monster they want.

I think engaging in hypotheticals like this is ultimately unproductive. You have taken a political attitude that Good may have held ("ICE bad") and generalized it to an attitude toward violence ("Therefore ICE agents are not deserving of, or at least need little consideration regarding, safety"). These two claims are, in fact, a grand canyon apart - not simply p therefore q. There is nothing to suggest Good was a longtime agitator or rallied behind violent acts.

I don't disagree that she was reckless, but I don't think we need to engage in broad speculation about why. I don't believe the reason behind that recklessness (or even the recklessness itself) really affects the moral calculus here.

Obviously a person state of mind you can never be 100% sure. But I think my description is a good educated guess. A person who tracks and harasses ICE likely has those views.

Also her wife was name calling ICE moments before so I think it would be a reasonable belief a same-sex couple has similar views (men often have different views than their wives so that would be less likely).

My gut says this is solidly in the category of didn’t try to kill but had zero concern about the officers safety. In many cases that ends up getting people killed.

Also I believe meets the definition of depraved-indifferent murder, in jurisdictions with such a thing. It just feels like that meme, with "I didn't mean to kill him, I just didn't care" and someone responding "That's worse. You know that's worse, right?"

She doesn’t seem panicked at all in the video. She is smiling, unstressed, comes across as giddy, arrogant, cognizant

She certainly is earlier in the video, but we lose track of her face as her girlfriend yells at her to drive, I assume that might have been some adrenaline rush at that point that would have contributed to her bad/reckless driving. I would think there is a case for charging the girlfriend.

Felony murder?

One of my group chats speculated about this. She is clearly participating in the crime of obstructing police, but I'm not enough of a lawyer to know if the felony murder rule can be applied. Obstruction is a misdemeanor, and it is the felony murder rule after all. (I am also not enough of a lawyer to know if that's what the word "felony" in "felony murder" refers to)

What I can say is that it is an extremely safe bet that if she gets charged it won't be by the state of Minnesota.

There is in some jdxs misdemeanor murder as well. I don’t know if the law she broke (or rather laws) constitute a felony (including fleeing)

Well, striking the officer with the vehicle is an assault with a deadly weapon, which is a felony, but I am not lawyer enough to know if you can charge the wife in this situation. She does shout "drive!", which is not protected speech because it is an "incitement of imminent lawless action," but I'm not sure what actual law you would charge them under. Conspiracy? My knowledge of the law is mostly limited to what laws I might expect to involve me in some way (mostly self defense), so criminal conspiracies are a lot more of a grey area.

If they are out of a group that coordinates interfering with the enforcement of law, I wonder if you can get RICO charges against the whole group and then felony murder?

More comments

You do not lose track of her face as she accelerates she is smiling and then closes her mouth with a grin.

She wasn't panicked until the other ICE employee wearing a balaclava charged in yelling "get out of the fucking car".

  • -21

Right, except that never happened. There's a video higher up in the comment chain where you can see that didn't happen.

It also conveniently shows her not being panicked.

I question your authenticity.

I don't think it's a good idea to publicly question the authenticity of people who post opinions that appear to be quite common. It drives me absolutely insane that mods on Reddit accuse me of being inauthentic or "trolling" for posting opinions held by the median Republican. Don't fall into the same trap.

It would’ve been reasonable to post this if hyperbolic yesterday. But after the video today it seems straight trolling.

I really dislike this sort of debating where whoever is in hostile territory needs to be 100% perfect and get everything 100% correct or they get eviscerated and get called intellectually dishonest. Zero charity extended. (I get this all the time on Reddit)

Like, when @LiberalRetvrn said the ICE agent was yelling "get out of the fucking car", but actually the agent was just saying it very firmly in a confrontational way - not actually yelling. So he's technically factually wrong so now everyone gets to sneer and dunk on him. Or when he claimed the woman was panicked, but people here are certain that she wasn't panicked based on half a second of low pixel facial expressions in that video. So he's factually wrong again and is being a dishonest troll and everyone gets to dunk on him.

I think this type of response from the community is primarily driven by a certain type of leftist poster who exists here, on the rest of the internet, and even in real life... who just does not engage in reality based thinking and every time something happens they spin out a narrative, it's never true, they update only if piled on tremendously, and then they move on to the next excuse.

As an example all the woke-trolling here in the wake of the event leaning on "oh no, she's definitely here randomly and is scared of these unknown masked figures" as if it is as all reasonable to believe that given all of the interviews that were available from the moment the shooting happened (and common sense). But if you lie like that you will convince people and some people will never update (see: Rittenhouse shooting).

And if it's not lying then its believing something that is clearly not true (in the sense that it makes little sense) and was untrue last time and the time before that, and therefore becomes indistinguishable from deliberate trolling or excess blindness.

It makes me mad just writing this comment, which is why people so aggressively pile on.

It is the belief of many moderates and conservatives that the woke-left live in a world where things like reason, consistency, and common sense do not apply....and it's frustrating to see and results in piling on.

Left leaning comments on these sorts of things are almost always objectively wrong. A half dozen people have to have "shooting to maim" explained to them every time a cop shoots someone.

If you don't want these people to get dogpiled make them be correct more often about the facts.

From there we can get to the murkier business of ethics and so on.

It isn’t half a second. It’s the entire interaction. It’s clear that’s the reaction she wanted.

And I’m not asking him to be 100% correct. I am asking him to refrain from making a claim that is pretty clearly more likely than not false.

I also thought his comment yesterday about how vital states rights are to resisting the federal government interfering with the agricultural productivity of its non citizens to be a little too on the nose. (The phrase "way of life" especially.)

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I really dislike this sort of debating where whoever is in hostile territory needs to be 100% perfect and get everything 100% correct or they get eviscerated and get called intellectually dishonest. Zero charity extended. (I get this all the time on Reddit)

It's interesting you see it this way, because from my point of you it looks like LiberalRetvrn just gets to make shit up, and to even respond we have to provide timestamped videos.

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This does not mean her intent was to kill or injure the officer. I disagree with your assessment of her affect, but even if I accepted it to be true, that's not sufficient to establish intent to harm. I could just as easily suggest that her expression comes from the rebellious thrill of evading the officer or is an idiosyncratic stress response. Regardless, these questions are long distant from the question of if the shot was justified.

i'm shocked at how quickly it spiralled out of control. it seems to be around 30s between when they make contact with her and when she was shot.

That’s how most real violence is.

Events like this are not unique. If you want another example, here's is a short video of another cop being run over by someone she was trying to detain from the perspective of the body cam.

All it took was 5 to 6 seconds for the suspect to get in his car and run her down.

No, she didn't survive.

login-walled. :(

XCancel Mirror for you.

Well that was disturbing. I don't know what I was expecting. Hearing the officer get hit is terrible. Apparently the jury got the unedited extended version where you can hear her struggle with her fatal crushing injuries.

I wonder if law enforcement is trained on these exact videos.

I don't know about law enforcement in general, but the FBI uses the Bittaker and Norris audio tapes (of the two men raping, torturing and murdering their female victims, many of whom were teenagers) to desensitize agents-in-training to extreme violence. To help Scott Glenn prepare for his role as Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs, an FBI consultant played him the tapes. Glenn left the room in floods of tears and was so upset by the experience that he refused to reprise his role in any of the sequels.

This is exactly why policing is hard.

This interpretation is inconsistent with what we know from the other videos. Keep in mind that you are seeing this from his cellphone. It's not a bodycam. It's in his hand and not tracking his body perfectly.

There is another video from the front of the car where you can see that he was walking across the vehicle and then clearly stops in front of her. We also know from multiple other videos that he does not go down. What it looks like, but it's not clear, is that his upper body somehow ends up leaning on the hood of the car.

You can't tell from this video that he stops in front of the car because the phone kept moving even though his body stopped, but it's absolutely clear from the other videos that he stopped and turned and faced her. It's also still not clear whether he was hit because we already knew that he stretched out his left hand (which must be holding the phone since the gun was in his right hand) and placed it on the hood of the car. I don't know how this confirms anything other than the fact that the hand holding the cellphone hit the car.

it appears to me that the driver looks directly at the ICE agent before driving forward. From this bodycam angle, her face is clearly shown looking directly ahead where the officer is seconds before she moves her car forward.

Yes, but keep in mind that at that point, he's still walking briskly across the front of the car. Had he continued, he would have been well clear of it by the time she finished backing up. So while she probably noticed him walking across the car, she wouldn't have known he had stopped until she looks up the second time and starts driving forward.

At the very least, maybe reasonable people can agree that the cop did not shoot the driver in cold blood from the side window.

We can clearly see that he did do that from the other videos. This video doesn't show the shooting itself. All three shots were taken when the camera was facing the sky.

  • -10

Illuminating video, in how an angry but non-violent situation can suddenly become a violent one.

I think it's helpful to look at this from the perspective of the four main people involved.

Good: within a couple seconds the situation goes, through no action of your own, to one where someone is trying to open your car door while telling you to "get out of the fucking car" (unclear if he is grabbing her with his left hand or just the door?), and your wife is yelling "drive, drive". I think this was an insanely stressful situation, and she is completely blameless for the actions she took in this video.

Shooter: somebody mad at you suddenly starts driving towards you. In retrospect clearly an unnecessary shot, especially continuing to shoot once they are not aiming at you, but probably falls within reasonable discretion in the heat of the moment. I think essentially blameless for actions in this video.

Wife: government agents suddenly start trying to pull your wife out of the car without warning. Yelling "drive, drive" is clearly bad in retrospect, but I understand where she's coming from. Still, not an appropriate reaction, and she certainly deserves some of the immediate blame for how this situation ended up.

Second agent: pulls up, and immediately marched up to the car, saying "get out of the car, get out of the fucking car". I'm not sure whether he starts trying to open the door before or after he becomes aware that she's going to reverse. Either way, completely ridiculous behaviour. If he had just walked up and said "ma'am, can you please get out of the car" none of this would have happened. If he hasn't asked her to get out of the car none of this has happened (why and under what authority is he asking this? As far as I can tell he has not seen or heard her do literally anything at this point, and she is not a target of his immigration enforcement activities). If he had just driven past like she was explicitly letting him do, none of this would have happened. The lion's share of the immediate blame rests on this officer. Unclear exactly how much he even knew about what was going on when he pulled up, but either way he turned up the temperature on this situation hugely for no apparent reason.

Beyond that, there is of course the question of who is responsible for starting this confrontation in the first place. My biases are that that is basically 100% on Trump et al. for pursuing immigration enforcement in a way that is prioritizing intimidation over both civil rights and actually targeting the bulk of illegal immigrants who are working in agriculture etc, and on the agents who choose to work under these conditions. But obviously others will disagree and I've tried to keep these biases out of my analysis of the immediate situation above.

  • -14

I think this was an insanely stressful situation, and [the driver] is completely blameless for the actions she took in this video.

If being confronted by a police officer stresses you out that badly then you probably shouldn't make it your hobby to go out and antagonize cops. This is a decision that was entirely under her control before she deliberately created a situation where she would inevitably end up confronted by a police officer. You can just not do that!

Yelling "drive, drive" is clearly bad in retrospect, but I understand where she's coming from. Still, not an appropriate reaction, and she certainly deserves some of the immediate blame for how this situation ended up.

While the wife is clearly an accomplice, the only extent to which I would find her responsible is the extent to which she participated in the decision for the two of them to go out and antagonize cops despite being clearly unprepared for the full implications of doing so. I don't think this is criminal. I don't think she bears any real responsibility for the stepping on the gas. A driver is responsible for the trajectory of their vehicle, nobody else.

If he hasn't asked her to get out of the car none of this has happened (why and under what authority is he asking this? As far as I can tell he has not seen or heard her do literally anything at this point,

She was barricading the road with her car, and had apparently been antagonizing them all day. Barricading the road was the last straw. ICE can arrest people for crimes, such as obstruction, committed against them.

She was barricading the road with her car

Given a car literally drives right passed her, this clearly wasn't going very effectively

  • -10

And if it turns out she actually was pretty effective, and this moment wasn't representative of her activities on that they, will that change your mind about anything, or will we just move on to the next bowl of spaghetti to throw at the wall?

Yeah I don't really have a dog in this fight

I think the high level goal of ICE is justified, I think it's execution is deliberately inflammatory and thus stupid.

I dislike the fact that people are fucking with ICE such that situations arise where citizens get shot, which is a tragedy.

I also have some sympathy for those getting baited into protesting ICE, as I believe ICE has been designed to create flashpoints such as this. So they're taking the bait, which I personally would not, but I see why they do.

So does an eyewitness describing her as "very successful at blocking traffic" move the needle for you in any way?

Yeah it marginally lowers my sympathy for her knowing she was being an active disturbance

Her death is a tragedy but also she gets a Darwin award.

You can just not do that!

Yes, and people could also choose not to drive around in masks, tactical gear, and unmarked cars to intimidate people in a city that the president perceives as inhabited by his enemies. As I say in the last paragraph, your view of this will depend on who you think is acting morally in this situation.

I don't think this is criminal.

I agree.

She was barricading the road with her car

Did you watch the same video I did? She was not, as seen by the fact that a car passes during the video, and she tries to wave the ICE truck by. She is blocking one lane of a two-lane one-way street, which would certainly warrant action from a real cop but does not seem to be any business of ICE's. I have no idea what happened earlier (do we have any evidence anything did?), but it was not "all day" as the shooting happened at 9:30 am, and she had already dropped her kid off at school.

Yes, and people could also choose not to drive around in masks, tactical gear, and unmarked cars to intimidate people in a city that the president perceives as inhabited by his enemies.

This is a long and roundabout way of saying "enforce immigration law," which is not only legal, but is literally the thing that the current president promised to do before he was elected in a landslide. If it's your honest belief that the government has no business enforcing its own laws immediately following an election in which the populace voted overwhelmingly for the government to do more enforcement of those very laws, I'm really not sure what you think the point of democracy is.

she tries to wave the ICE truck by

She is not a police officer and has no authority to direct traffic, and the convoy has no obligation to trust that she will allow them all to pass without, for example, obstructing just the back half of the convoy to split the convoy in half. If you do not understand why giving a hostile bystander the opportunity to split your convoy in half is bad tactics, you do not have sufficient insight to converse meaningfully on this issue.

My original post was to analyse the immediate events leading to the shooting. I'm not super interested in arguing about which side is more at fault for this kind of tense situation happening in the first place, I was just pointing out that there is possible and reasonable disagreement with your characterisation that it is her fault.

and the convoy has no obligation to trust that she will allow them all to pass without

Sounds like you agree then that she was not barricading the road, merely that she could decide to barricade the road.

To be frank, this is Minneapolis, not Afghanistan. Despite what Trump et al. would have you believe, left-wing protestors are not generally violent agitators just waiting for an opportunity to murder federal officials. Even if they decide against all reasonable evidence that they can't just drive by safely, there are many options that do not involve immediately saying "get out of the fucking car" and then trying to tear the door open.

Sounds like you agree then that she was not barricading the road, merely that she could decide to barricade the road.

A person manning a barricade can decide to allow passage through the barricade without it ceasing to be a barricade. Please do not argue semantics.

The idea that the police force that is currently being protested by the person who has parked her car across the road, in the context of a nationwide spree of activists using their cars to disrupt ICE operations, can reasonably expect that she intends to behave cooperatively as they pass, is absurd. They absolutely should not expect that she intends to cooperate in their passage.

left-wing protestors are not generally violent agitators just waiting for an opportunity to murder federal officials.

True, but they do have the explicitly stated goal of obstructing and interfering with law enforcement operations. There have been numerous car ramming attacks by left wing activists all over the country. It's pretty reasonable to treat the left wing activist sitting in her car sideways in the road in front of you as very likely intending to add to that number.

Even if they decide against all reasonable evidence that they can't just drive by safely, there are many options that do not involve immediately saying "get out of the fucking car" and then trying to tear the door open.

Police are under no obligation, legal or otherwise, to be nice to lawbreakers. Being treated unkindly by the police is a completely predictable consequence of breaking the law, and if you want them to treat you kindly you can simply not do that.

I don't think I'm arguing semantics, I don't see any indication that she ever made any attempt to prevent anybody from driving down the street, which is the core definition of a barricade.

It's pretty reasonable to treat the left wing activist sitting in her car sideways in the road in front of you as very likely intending to add to that number.

I think this is the crux of our disagreement, I think this is an insane thing to believe. I'm not sure there's much else for us to discuss after that.

So after a year in which there have been 66 vehicle ramming attacks against ICE agents, you don't think it's reasonable to believe that the hostile activist who has been following you around all morning and is now parked sideways across the street in front of you, is more likely than not to be intending to use their vehicle to disrupt your convoy?

Exactly what is it reasonable to believe about the intentions of the hostile activist who has been following you around all morning and has now parked her car sideways across the street in front of you?

Let me lay it out more clearly.

You are an ICE agent. You are in a city whose governor and mayor have stirred up resentment against your lawful activities, in which activists have been organizing to oppose you.

A woman and her wife have been following you all morning, antagonizing you as you go about your work.

Later, as you drive down a street, you come across these women, with their car parked sideways across the street. You recognize them as people you have been having hostile interactions with all morning.

There have been 66 vehicle ramming attacks against ice agents in the past year.

Given the facts above, what is it reasonable for you to believe in this moment?

I do not believe it is possible for someone whose brain has not been swiss-cheesed by ideological capture to answer "actually I think it's most likely that she has totally legal reasons to be doing that which have nothing to do with me." If that's your answer you are an NPC, you have no theory of mind or independent opinions of your own.

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If he had just walked up and said "ma'am, can you please get out of the car" none of this would have happened

There is literally no reason to believe this. These lesbians were there specifically to obstruct ICE, there is no reason to think a little politeness will suddenly make them compliant.

I think this was an insanely stressful situation, and she is completely blameless for the actions she took in this video.

She was there specifically to obstruct law enforcement. She ignored their orders to get out of the car. She tried to flee straight through an ICE agent walking directly in front of her car. On what dishonest leftist planet is ANY of this blameless?

It is shocking to me that even on the sacred Motte, of all places, even in the face of incontrovertible video evidence we still have to deal with insane leftist sophistry and blatant lies.

One is reminded of a certain relevant quote:

The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day. Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck. I didn't know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying. Gradually I began to hate them.

How do you feel about the Trump administration calling her a domestic terrorist who was participating in a violent riot?

As with most things about this administration, it's an overcorrection from Trump 1 and Biden.

It's inaccurate and over the top. They probably should run it by some marketing / PR people to come up with a snappy term that's less severe than "terrorist" but still makes it clear she was acting with malice.

To be clear, when I say "in this video", I mean that she did nothing to escalate the situation in this video, up until the point where she had both the agent and her wife yelling at her. As I say, your opinions on ultimate blame will somewhat depend on who you think is responsible for creating this conflict in the first place.

There is literally no reason to believe this. These lesbians were there specifically to obstruct ICE, there is no reason to think a little politeness will suddenly make them compliant.

I do not feel like you are viewing this person as a fully realized human rather than an undifferentiated member of your outgroup. Normal, well-adjusted people don't generally ignore polite but firm requests from cops, and I have no reason to think she was anything but a normal, well-adjusted person who made a dumb decision in a moment of panic. Honestly I find it pretty ludicrous to imagine that this situation would have ended up with someone dead if the agents had behaved like normal well-trained cops, and I think you should re-examine your biases if you believe otherwise. Leftists are not generally crazed lunatics who are unable to respond to incentives.

I do not understand how your reaction to my post where I state that the agent was probably justified to shoot her is to start ranting about insane leftist sophistry and quoting Hitler. Good to see the Motte hasn't changed since I used to post on Reddit.

I have no reason to think she was anything but a normal, well-adjusted person

Going to a 'protest' to blockade government activity is not the action of a normal, well-adjusted person. You may think it's a good thing! Necessary, maybe even sacred, whatever. But not normal and well-adjusted.

Honestly I find it pretty ludicrous to imagine that this situation would have ended up with someone dead if the agents had behaved like normal well-trained cops

Situation much like this one have happened possibly dozens of times, maybe hundreds or thousands if we broaden the category, over the last 10 years in this country, and very few of them end this way. It's less about the specific training (even if it was inadequate) and that every such interaction is rolling a handful of D20s: how does the subject react, how does the officer react, what are the environmental factors making them react better/worse, etc. This encounter rolled too many 1s.

If you expect perfection in every single encounter, you are not living in reality.

Likewise, living in Minneapolis, the victim of this tragedy was not living in reality.

If you expect perfection in every single encounter, you are not living in reality.

Not sure I understand what you're saying. Of course this situation required a confluence of factors to end how it did. But I believe one of those factors is that ICE agents are regularly escalating situations that could be deescalated (many such cases in videos coming out of Minneapolis). I assume this is some combination of top-down direction, poor training, and internal culture. It would be better if this wasn't the case.

How often are agents provocateurs interfering with ICE? How often do cops have to restrain drug-addled subjects resisting arrest? Both occur pretty regularly, right? Most of the time both situations end up with no consequences; very rarely something bad happens and then it's the cause du jour for a round of mass stupidity.

No amount of training gets you perfection.

regularly escalating situations that could be deescalated

How exactly does one deescalate against people wanting escalation, short of giving up and unilateral disarmament? That's what I mean by expecting perfection.

It would be better if this wasn't the case.

It would be better if protestors didn't interfere. It would be better if we hadn't spent years ignoring the border. It would be better if men were angels and we didn't need government at all.

Alas, people Will Not Just.

How exactly does one deescalate against people wanting escalation

If someone is not being violent, you make sure they are doing something that warrants arrest, you tell them they are under arrest or otherwise make it clear they are being arrested, and you give them a chance to comply before assaulting them. But that is clearly not happening in many cases. Here's a couple more that could very easily have also resulted in someone dying:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1q9xczh/ice_pushes_man_into_oncoming_traffic/ Shoving someone into traffic is clearly not the appropriate response here.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ICE_Watch/comments/1qc21p8/ice_abducted_a_woman_trying_to_get_to_a_doctors/ Hard to know exactly what's happening here, obviously the headline on that post is overblown. But it sure seems to me like agents are telling her to get out of her car and to keep driving at the same time. Most blatant though is at 43 seconds where an agent smashes her passenger side window for no reason. Exactly how is this supposed to help things?

https://old.reddit.com/r/ICE_Watch/comments/1qavmee/ice_in_minneapolis_ramming_civilian_cars_through Again, an overblown headline, and I'll admit that there's no proof this is actually ICE although it seems likely. But the correct response to someone blocking you is to ask them to move, and to arrest them if they won't, not to push their car out of the way.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QZTxiBQOnZ4 Agent attacks someone for no reason.

I don't doubt that it is difficult for ICE et al. to accomplish their mission while respecting the rights of protestors, and only acting against those who genuinely step over the line. I guess I would just say "too bad". There are many different levers in politics, law, and society, and if you don't control enough of them, you don't get to accomplish your goals. If you don't have buy-in from the local populace, police, or political system, it's a feature of the system that that makes things difficult, not a bug.

The response of an authoritarian to this problem is to send in the jackboots. That is genuinely what this feels like to me.

respecting the rights of protestors

Is obstruction a protestor's right? Are they truly that protected of a class that they can do basically whatever they want? The whole conflation of action and speech really went off the rails somewhere along the way.

If you don't have buy-in from the local populace, police, or political system, it's a feature of the system that that makes things difficult, not a bug.

We should build a wall around Minnesota instead of Mexico.

Also the results of the last event of insufficient buy-in from the local political system was putting them down by the hundreds of thousands and telling states' rights to get fucked. Federalism won the day, baby!

The response of an authoritarian to this problem is to send in the jackboots.

Was Eisenhower wrong to federalize the guard?

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This seems delusional to me. They are dealing with people who are committed to using escalation as a tactic. There is almost no chance de-escalation techniques will do anything other than aid the obstruction.

Just as an example, why at 43 seconds into this video does an agent smash the passenger window of the car? What possible reason is there for that?https://old.reddit.com/r/ICE_Watch/comments/1qc21p8/ice_abducted_a_woman_trying_to_get_to_a_doctors/

Why does this agent push a man nearly in front of a bus? Is that what you would consider reasonable protocol to use to arrest someone who is doing nothing but standing in front of your car? Surely the first step would be to tell them they are being arrested? https://old.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1q9xczh/ice_pushes_man_into_oncoming_traffic/

You don't have to be under arrest for a police officer to be able to issue you a lawful order to exit a vehicle or move out of the way. If you decide you don't want to, then you are obstructing and that is legitimate cause for arrest.

Often, police don't like announcing someone is under arrest until they are in custody or at least a controlled situation, because it tends to increase the odds that someone will flee or start to fight.

So, in the first case, it's hard to say for sure but it's plausible that this woman has been given lawful orders to exit her vehicle and not done so. The next step is forcible removal, which necessitates breaking the window if it is rolled up.

In the second case, shoving someone out of the way who is deliberately obstructing them is perfectly reasonable, and a lesser use of force than arresting then. The proximity of the bus is less than ideal, but mistakes are inevitable.

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On what dishonest leftist planet

insane leftist sophistry and blatant lies.

Well, thank you for perfectly illustrating what I've been saying, I guess. Look, you can believe you have an absolute grasp on the truth and anyone who disagrees with you is an insane evil liar, but while I was inclined to let this go as badly-argued overheated rhetoric, throwing a little Mein Kampf quote in there for extra-culture warring makes me think you're just trolling. Knock it off.

Okay, my apologies. I acknowledge my comment was over the top. However, in my defense, I think there is a point where blatant dishonesty is more corrosive to this forum’s norms of charitable good-faith discourse than any number of nasty words. Take LiberalRetvrn downthread spewing stuff like this:

All I saw was a guy in a mask jumping out of an unmarked vehicle and running toward her …. In that situation it seems reasonable to fear for one's life.

This is such a flagrant and deliberate mischaracterization of video that all of us can see that it degrades the norms of discussion here and is exactly what the Mein Kampf quote was directed at. I will clean up my act but for the sake of discussion I implore you to moderate blatant dishonesty.

This is such a flagrant and deliberate mischaracterization of video that all of us can see that it degrades the norms of discussion here and is exactly what the Mein Kampf quote was directed at

... Jews?

I implore you to moderate blatant dishonesty

We do not make value judgments about whether someone is making good arguments or being honest when it comes to moderation. We'd be banning people right and left if we responded every time someone accuses someone else of being dishonest.

... Jews?

FWIW, I first saw that quote a few weeks ago and my immediate thought was "Holy shit, I know exactly what he's talking about! I've had that exact same experience a thousand times! I'd just call the person responsible a leftist instead of a Jew."

Given historical realities, it's quite possible that the specific people he's referring to (presuming such exist) happened to be both.

But that pattern... it's like God of the Gaps on steroids, run by a person with absolutely no concern for internal consistency or intellectual honor/shame. It's the purest essence of Arguments as Soldiers, the final form of "There's no such thing as objective truth, just competing power narratives". Maybe it shows up on the right too, and I don't argue with them enough these days to see it. But in all my years of internet atheisting and libertarding I don't think I ever encountered a fundie or neocon who went full... whatever that is.

And it is basically a particularly vicious form of nerd sniping against the kind of systematizing autists who frequent this place. But it's not actually against the rules. And it's effective, to an extent, because there's no real defense against it except to go full @gattsuru "He's an exhaustive list of every time this was explained to you and you failed to rebut the fact claims in any way."

I don't have any useful suggestions for wrangling this as a moderator (except to unchain The Gattsuru). Good luck, I guess.

Well, yes, that is definitely a pattern that exists. We've all encountered it (and I have encountered it with rightists). Hitler might have been describing a real phenomenon, but "This is specifically Jewish behavior" was obviously Hitler's hangup, and quoting Hitler to say "You're acting like a Jew" breaks a few Motte rules (none of which is, contra @SecureSignals, "don't say negative things about Jews").

Good: within a couple seconds the situation goes, through no action of your own, to one where someone is trying to open your car door while telling you to "get out of the fucking car"

You mean other than blocking a street and harassing ICE agents?

In this video we do not see her blocking a street nor harassing ICE agents. She is sitting in her car trying to wave the ICE agents by.

  • -11

False but doesn’t seem profitable to engage

Honestly the driver looks at the ICE agent for a millisecond. I don't think she registered the ICE agent was in her path. She is a bad driver and sometimes bad driving kills someone, but I don't think this video proves that she was gunning for the agent.

That said, the thing that keeps getting missed in this discussion is that Good is dead. She's not on trial here. Her mens rea doesn't matter, except for the normal human response to tragedy is to speculate, "That could never happen to me, I would never do the thing which lead to that."

Legally speaking and physically speaking, it is entirely possible for Good to have normal intentions and still pose a serious and immanent threat to the ICE agent.

She is a bad driver and sometimes bad driving kills someone

I could see 4chan or rdrama working this angle in a troll Justice4Renee campaign (like Justice4Darell). That blaming Renee is ableist and misogynistic, since as a woman she is a bad driver and couldn’t consent to hitting the ICE agent due to the power dynamics involved.

It would pair well with first caveating, like a stolen land acknowledgment, that mourning Renee may not be the “right thing to do” since “white tears are not something that’s always helpful or necessary.” This bit they wouldn’t even need to invent; reality provided it for free.

She clearly does not have “normal” intentions. She was being detained by ICE and the most charitable explanation you can give is she was resisting arrest but did not mean to hit the cop.

I think it’s also fairly clear that she was using her car to block ICE from using the road. Obstruction seems obvious in the video. And then resisting arrest after a lawful command to exit the vehicle.

Yes, that is true, but the innocence of the ICE agent does not hinge on any of those details.

I don’t think ICE agents are prosecutable right now. I can’t see a situation where I would vote to convict an ICE agent. I have no idea what percent of the population falls in this category but I do believe it’s significant. The opposite being it’s probably close to impossible to convict ICE protestors of obstruction in blue states.

I can’t see a situation where I would vote to convict an ICE agent.

To me, this is a very weird thing to say.

For me, the American I probably respect most is probably Scott Alexander, my rightful caliph. And yet I can think of plenty (if unlikely) situations where I would definitely vote to convict him of a crime. Even in the middle of a civil war (Grey Tribe versus the rest of the world?), I can still imagine a lot of possible behaviors I would not let slide.

That is because just like him, I am a big fan of civility, and breaking civilizational norms is generally bad.

I will charitably interpret your statement as implying 'for anything he did on the job', and hope that you would still consider convicting someone for killing his girlfriend or raping kids.

But even on the job, I can think of plenty of behaviors I would not want to see from ICE even if I was 100% convinced that they were doing god's work. Gunning down suspects fleeing on foot. Blowing up protesters' cars to dissuade others from blocking them. Torturing people to find out the whereabouts of their targets. Raping detainees. Like every other group of humans, there are likely people in ICE who need to be dissuaded from such defections against humanity by threat of punishment. Saying categorically that you would not punish them basically means endorsing all of that.

I have no problem with "I would not convict Ross for the shooting of Good". It is not a position I share (based on my impression so far, I could be persuaded either way by new evidence emerging in a trial), but for that case it is at least one of the positions within the civilizational Overton window.

I think ICE is doing gods work and that’s why it’s not a good comparison to Scott Alexander who I do like. ICE isn’t an idea….they have a mission. It’s to prevent the Brazilianification of the US. If you import a large amount of workers with no ability to do knowledge work or high incomes they will vote against mine and my children’s interests. I don’t want that. I don’t hate the immigrants. But I do think America can’t go down the path of Latam politics and it would be a disaster for civilization.

So yes I’m a guaranteed not guilty vote for any ICE actions.

ICE agents can't be prosecuted by the state for things that happened in the course of their duties, but they can still be prosecuted at the federal level.

Yes. Unfortunately "Police Officers are not allowed to shoot people driving vehicles at them" is an untenable position since it basically makes it open season for any given criminal who wants to blast their way out of a traffic stop or chase.

But it is, in fact, the law. The police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing. Yes, that makes it more likely they'll flee. But there are good reasons we don't just allow the maximum punishment for all offences in order to minimize crime.

  • -35

Are you having issues reading what was written?

"the police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing." is an entirely different sentence than what faceh wrote which was "Police officers are not allowed to shoot people driving vehicles at them."

It's right there in the comment you were replying to.

Blasting out of a traffic stop is not the same as driving a vehicle at a police officer. Police officers don't normally stand in front of vehicles that have been pulled over. So if someone were to drive away during almost any traffic stop, the law absolutely prevents police officers from using lethal force to prevent that.

The poster was so adamant yesterday. Now the new video harms his/her position and now the poster seems to be spiraling.

You are reading

"Police Officers are not allowed to shoot people driving vehicles at them"

as

The police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing.

Which I don't think is a fair reading - the former is likely legal (likely life in danger based on just based on a common reading of the text) and the latter is likely not by the same standard.

No, I'm not. I'm reading

since it basically makes it open season for any given criminal who wants to blast their way out of a traffic stop or chase.

As

The police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing.

The police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing.

This is flatly untrue. They can, they simply have to have a reasonable belief that the person poses a threat to the officer or others. They can't shoot them solely for fleeing

That's not shooting them for fleeing. That's shooting them to protect people.

The distinction is important because the law does, in fact, grant open season for any given criminal who wants to flee the police to do so long as he doesn't pose an imminent threat of severe bodily harm. Trying to use that as a reductio ad absurdum fails because the supposedly absurd scenario is unquestionably the current law.

They can, they simply have to have a reasonable belief that the person poses a threat to the officer or others.

A lot of people defending the shooting are being overly loose with what constitutes sufficient grounds for deadly force. It's important to stress that is generally not permissible to kill someone just because you have a reasonable belief he poses a threat to others. The vast majority of cases where such a threat exists would not a justify a killing, and this case, in my opinion falls squarely in that case.

The threat must be imminent and one that risks severe bodily harm, and the killing must be necessary to prevent it. The set of circumstances in which you can kill someone in self-defence is pretty narrow and being loose with the wording of the law in this way is wildly misleading.

Not what I said. Firing into a fleeing vehicle is one thing. But if the criminal is aware they can run down an officer without being fired upon...

Its a very perverse incentive, to say the least. "Why not add vehicular manslaughter to my array of charges in exchange for a 2% chance of escaping for a few more hours."

I don't understand what you think normally prevents drivers from fleeing traffic stops. Police don't ordinarily put themselves in front of vehicles to prevent them from leaving. Are you saying that they do and that, because they are legally allowed to shoot drivers in these situations, that's how they prevent driver's from fleeing traffic stops?

The reality is that drivers absolutely can just flee a traffic stop without getting shot, which I think you probably understand, so I really don't get what you're trying to say.

Is your argument that police need the right to shoot at people driving their vehicles at them to protect themselves in such situations?

I agree with you that if for some reason police officers did have good reason to be physically blocking a car with their bodies that they'd have the right to shoot someone who tried to run them over if it would help (which it normally wouldn't), and for that reason, there is some additional deterrence for the driver to run the police officer over.

But in reality, the cop shooting the driver would not normally prevent him from being run over, and it would also be a crime for the driver to run him over (in addition to the crime of fleeing). So there is plenty of deterrent. The police do not need an infinite level of deterrence capability to protect themselves against minute risks, which seem to be regularly exaggerated.

You could have a legal system that gave police very wide latitude to use the threat of force to enforce the law, incluing deliberately placing themselves in harms way, daring suspects to do something dangerous and risk getting shot. But that's not the legal system the United States has. It puts more value on protecting criminals from themselves than from giving the police the maximum level of coercive tools. It expects police officers to avoid dangerous situations to minimize the risk of anyone, including suspects from getting hurt. The shooter went against those expectations and did something he wasn't supposed to do, and it resulted in someone's death.

Its a very perverse incentive, to say the least. "Why not add vehicular manslaughter to my array of charges in exchange for a 2% chance of escaping for a few more hours."

I don't get what you're saying here. Doesn't that quote show how the supposed incentive you're alleging doesn't exist? Why would anyone make that trade off?

That is a sufficient deterrent. You don't need to add death on top of decades in prison to the consequences of this decision. If the police think that that deterrent isn't enough, they can just not block moving vehicles with their bodies.

I don't understand what you think normally prevents drivers from fleeing traffic stops.

Normally?

A respect for the concept of 'law' as a foundational social good that is generally best to comply with even when its not in your immediate best interests.

But in reality, the cop shooting the driver would not normally prevent him from being run over, and it would also be a crime for the driver to run him over (in addition to the crime of fleeing). So there is plenty of deterrent. The police do not need an infinite level of deterrence capability to protect themselves against minute risks, which seem to be regularly exaggerated.

Look... we actually saw what happens when the police are pulled back from enforcing basic rules. You can get CHAZ/CHOP.

Famously, the rate of automobile-related deaths for Black Americans shot up in the wake of George Floyd riots.

Deterrence clearly has an effect. And of course if the risks are 'minute' that doesn't inherently mean they're not put in risky situations without much notice and thus need to have the ability to respond proportionally.

I ask you seriously. If a police officer is justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately swinging a knife in his direction (and actually cuts him, nonfatally)... is it hard to see why he might also be justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately driving a car in his direction (and actually strikes him, nonfatally)?

How much 'risk' is he obligated to tolerate in either scenario?

I don't get what you're saying here. Doesn't that quote show how the supposed incentive you're alleging doesn't exist? Why would anyone make that trade off?

Because they are a criminal with poor impulse control and foresight and in their mind, being arrested means going to jail and driving away, even if it hurts a cop, means maybe not going to jail.

Or they're a protestor who has been convinced by activists that a particular law enforcement agency is a force for evil and if they arrest you they'll shove you into a black site and torture you for resisting the regime and its better to 'resist'.

These are possible answers to that question.

Why do you think Cops carry guns at all?

We could eliminate almost all police shootings by simply disallowing them from carrying weapons on their persons.

I think we're in agreement that there's a medium ground between "cop can never fire their weapons except in the gravest of circumstances" and "cops should be able to gun you down if they feel the smallest threat."

I'm simply suggesting that "police officers can treat moving vehicles like other deadly weapons" is a generally good, stance. I know for sure that if somebody was apparently trying to run me down with a car, I would consider it justifiable to shoot at them. I do not think reasonable people need a 'deterrent' to not run down people with cars... but unreasonable people might.

I don't think it makes any sense to say "we can't know if the danger to the officer was real unless they actually get run over."

A respect for the concept of 'law' as a foundational social good that is generally best to comply with even when its not in your immediate best interests.

Then why do the police need to shoot suspects to keep them from fleeing? Maybe I misunderstood your point above.

Look... we actually saw what happens when the police are pulled back from enforcing basic rules.

I'm not suggesting they pull back from enforcing basic rules. I'm suggesting that this particular office adhere to the long-established and current practice of not standing in front of moving cars with a drawn pistol to stop them from fleeing. There are other ways of enforcing rules.

I ask you seriously. If a police officer is justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately swinging a knife in his direction (and actually cuts him, nonfatally)... is it hard to see why he might also be justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately driving a car in his direction (and actually strikes him, nonfatally)?

Yes, because it's not the same. It's a lot easier to just get out of the way of a moving car than it is to escape someone with a knife. There is a common thread in these arguments defending the shooter where they treat self-defence situations as binary. There is either a threat or there isn't. But in reality, there is always a threat. It's a question of whether the threat is sufficient. The threat posed by someone swinging a knife is much less than someone driving a car at a low speed with unclear intent.

How do you know she intended to hit him with her car? How do you know he was hit with the car?

It also matters that shooting someone driving a car is a terrible way of stopping the car, whereas it is an excellent way of stopping someone with a knife.

It's not hard for me to see how someone who ignores all of these details might think the shooting was justified. What is hard to see how is it remains justified after considering them.

Because they are a criminal with poor impulse control and foresight and in their mind, being arrested means going to jail and driving away, even if it hurts a cop, means maybe not going to jail.

Even if it works as a deterrent, there are better alternatives, which is why it's not standard police practice.

Why do you think Cops carry guns at all?

For protecting people's lives, not for preventing suspects from fleeing.

I'm simply suggesting that "police officers can treat moving vehicles like other deadly weapons" is a generally good, stance.

I know, and I disagree with that very strongly. They're not at all like other deadly weapons.

It would be like if it were normal for almost everyone to walk around with a gun, and if someone were being detained by the police and tried to run away, the fact that they had a gun on them justified shooting them. There would have to be some action taken by the suspect that made it likely that he planned on shooting the officer trying to detain him. That action could not be some small thing that had a remote chance of indicating an intention to kill.

I don't think it makes any sense to say "we can't know if the danger to the officer was real unless they actually get run over."

I didn't say that.

I think the chance that this changes anybody's perception is 0. Scrolling X I see equal right wing gloating over how right they (we) were and left wing gloating about how right they were. Both sides think this video confirms what they already thought.

Here's a bisky post demonstrating what I mean: https://bsky.app/profile/jsweetli.bsky.social/post/3mbz3zjxzpk2t

Here's another example from X: https://x.com/dpakman/status/2009704541793747294

David Pakman must know what he's doing here, right? He's not stupid. My theory of mind for these people is that they genuinely know they're being duplicitous, but they see that as a greater good.

Just a vibes comment: there is something very strange to me about her female partner. The aggression, telling her to "drive drive", the body language, etc....it just gets my hackles up a bit.

There isn't that much new information. We find out what the police officer saw the suspect doing, such as where she was looking, and we get a better sense of how close he was to the car when it started moving towards him.

My personal update from this footage is: if I saw this driver look at me and then surge forward with her car and hit me I would reasonably conclude she's trying to hurt me/my partners. She is dangerous.

Whether she intended to hurt me is interesting but not relevant to my decision to open fire. I'd absolutely have shot her too.

Basically, she seems more dangerous and the agent more reasonable than yesterday.

I agree that it makes it more likely. I still think it's more likely she was not trying to do that. If the entire case hinged on the idea that it was reasonable for him to think she was trying to hit him, I would say that was false on the balance of probabilities, but would not rise to the level of proof beyond all reasonable doubt. The problem is that that is just one part of a whole series of things the officer needs to show in order to claim self-defence, including that it was reasonable for him to be standing there in the first place, that shooting her was his only option, that that danger still existed at the time at a point he could have decided not to shoot her, and that shooting her protected his life, each of which I think is false.

I also think it's still extremely unlikely she was trying to seriously injure him. I could buy that she intended to knock him over or something without seriously injuring him, maybe being unaware of how dangerous that was. I could also buy that she came close enough to doing that that he reasonably thought she had worse intentions, but I still think he knew enough to know that that wasn't very likely and if he did think it was likely, he had all the less reason to try to block her escape in that way. I also think it should have been clear to before he started shooting that she was not going to run him over. There are just too many very unlikely things that all have to be true for him not to be guilty.

There isn't that much new information.

Well at a minimum, it doesn't appear that the officer was trying to game the situation by setting up a situation here if the woman tried to drive away, then he'd have an excuse to shoot her. I believe a lot of people had been suggesting that.

Also, it doesn't appear that this woman was just an innocent bystander or an "observer," but rather she was part of the crew that were trying to obstruct and provoke ICE agents.

Well at a minimum, it doesn't appear that the officer was trying to game the situation by setting up a situation here if the woman tried to drive away, then he'd have an excuse to shoot her.

It seems like that's exactly what he was trying to do. What in the video made you think that's not what was going on?

Also, it doesn't appear that this woman was just an innocent bystander or an "observer," but rather she was part of the crew that were trying to obstruct and provoke ICE agents.

Sure. I didn't think there were a lot of people taking that idea seriously.

It seems like that's exactly what he was trying to do. What in the video made you think that's not what was going on?

  1. He was walking around the car (as opposed to planting himself in one particular location).

  2. It's reasonably clear that what triggered Renee Good's attempt to drive off was the other officer stepping up to the car, the fact that this happened at the moment the shooter was standing in front of the car appears to be a coincidence.

I didn't think there were a lot of people taking that idea seriously.

Before irrefutable evidence came out against them, both ideas (first, that she was an uninvolved person dropping her kids off at school, and second, that she was just an "observer") were being pushed pretty hard in various circles.

Well at a minimum, it doesn't appear that the officer was trying to game the situation by setting up a situation here if the woman tried to drive away, then he'd have an excuse to shoot her. I believe a lot of people had been suggesting that.

Disagree: that more or less implicitly is what standing in front of her car is, though I wouldn't phrase it "an excuse to shoot her." Obviously his body can't physically stop the car, but by standing in front of the car he's applying the implied/assumed consequences of hitting him to deter her from leaving. "I'll stand here so if you try to escape you'll have to hit me, and you know hitting me will make things way worse for you than just trying to escape otherwise." Those consequences are both "an additional serious charge" and also "you might get shot."

Disagree: that more or less implicitly is what standing in front of her car is, though I wouldn't phrase it "an excuse to shoot her."

Did you see the most recent video? It seems to depict the officer walking in a big circle around the car, as opposed to planting himself in front of it. Agreed?

You really need to watch all the videos. Each video on its own can easily give one a false impression that is totally dispelled by another video. He clearly stopped and turned to face the car just as she was finishing backing up.

It's very hard to determine the relative movement of objects in the cell phone video because the cell phone is moving the entire time. It moves quite a bit when stops and shoots at the car because he's doing a lot with his hands.

A lot of people even think it's a bodycam video and are probably assuming its movement tracks the movement of his torso. If you make that false assumption, you're going to think he never stopped moving and that the car hit his body. But the cell phone video doesn't show that. All you know is his hand didn't stop moving and his hand hit the car, which you can see in the other videos.

You really need to watch all the videos. Each video on its own can easily give one a false impression that is totally dispelled by another video.

I am a little confused.

  1. Do you agree that the officer's cellphone video shows that he walked in a circle around the car?

  2. Do you agree that the precipitating event for Renee Good's decision to drive off was another officer walking up to her car and instructing her to get out?

  3. Are you saying that the second officer timed things so that the shooter was in front of the car at that moment?

  1. Yes.
  2. It's quite possible, but I don't know.
  3. No, I'm not saying that has anything to do with the second officer. I'm saying the shooter planted himself in front of the driver right before she was about to drive off.
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I mostly see lefties sliding goalposts.

Which is to say, they are 'changing' their minds, but only exactly as much as needed to maintain the outrage.

Sadly, I've seen nothing but doubling and tripling down that this video just proves all "rightoids" are completely delusional, replete with "boot licker" and "psychopath" thrown around liberally, with ruminations on how "there's no living with these people;" in other words, "something" will have to be done about "the fascists" (which, to no-one's surprise, just happens to coincide with power fantasies of eliminating people they don't agree with).

Leftists always double down has been a known thing for a while now.

The irony i'm seeing is the tacit admission that this video makes the victim look like a hostile interloper while the ICE Officer was calmly filming the interaction... and some are claiming her 'bravely' confronting him is why he wanted to shoot her.

As proof of this, they point out he called her a 'bitch' under his breath after the incident. Y'know, after she drove the car at him.

Dropped all pretense of "just some random passerby".

On twitter I was just accused of lacking empathy for simply pointing out that this video makes her look very aware of her actions and very much not a pure victim of circumstance.

I don't think the right should be holding the dude up as a hero or anything, either, but the lefty impulse to make martyrs out of their people seems to be irresistible to them.

I don't think the right should be holding the dude up as a hero or anything, either, but the lefty impulse to make martyrs out of their people seems to be irresistible to them.

Personally I don’t think guy is a hero and if I knew him I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was a violent asshole. However, I think the right has learned something they didn’t know in 2020 with Chauvin. As you said, the left will always defend their own and will happily make heroes out of murderers. They will make sure Weather Underground terrorists get sinecures and support. This woman’s partner will get a massive gofundme. It is time the right does the same, even if the people don’t deserve it. Like the gofundme for that n-word lady (both of them). I expect we will see the right much more vigorously defending this guy, they won’t just let the left destroy him like they did Chauvin, there will probably be a highly successful gofundme as well

Hell, the right's problem seems to be that they won't come to the aid of their 'heroes' once they've been expunged of all their usefulness and 15 minutes of fame.

As a purely strategic matter, Kyle Rittenhouse, after his not-guilty, should have been given an easy, decently paying job at a think tank or some state-level political office, keep him generally out of public eye but also comfortable enough standard of living. Instead he's working at a gun store in the Florida Panhandle.

Nobody expects that becoming a sacrifice for the right's cause will get them any material rewards or posthumous accolades. I would point out that people have already sort of forgotten Iryna.

Vance at least is making all the right signals for backing the foot soldiers. I doubt they throw their people under the bus anymore. One of the biggest signs of the changing times came when an ICE prosecutor with a blatantly racist Twitter account didn't get fired when it came out.

What's to say that Kyle wants a sinecure at a desk? He's got a full time job, healthy twitter fanbase, and can still get speaking gigs. Certainly I wouldn't say that he was sacrificed by any means.

He also got married, which is quite a checkpoint achievement compared to others in his age group.

It looks like he has a shot at getting his life together after a realllly sucky couple years.

I guess I'm just saying he should never want for a job for the next 10 years, and should only have to appear in public because he wants to.

Do, just to pick a famous example, the January 6 pardons not count?

I mean, they would, had they not been such a heroic effort on the part of the electorate voting for a guy explicitly running on promising to do so. Most establishment Republicans denounced it, along with mainstream Republican media organizations.

I don't know if they still thought there was some value in trying to be perceived as "fairly calling balls and strikes" or if they are addicted to losing, or if they really are controlled opposition. But rest assured, the only reason that happened is because a possibly crazy person (and I say that affectionately) won a historical electoral victory with that as a part of his public platform, to the consternation and finger wagging of nearly everyone with fake PTSD from Jan 6th.

And in another historical first, he actually did what he promised on the campaign trail. Which the political class cried was somehow "corrupt". What you are supposed to do is promise to do things and then not do them! Anything less is immoral!

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Hell, the right's problem seems to be that they won't come to the aid of their 'heroes' once they've been expunged of all their usefulness and 15 minutes of fame.

It appears that Daniel Penny got hired by Andreessen Horowitz.

One of the biggest signs of the changing times came when an ICE prosecutor with a blatantly racist Twitter account didn't get fired when it came out.

Interesting. I'm familiar with that account and it's a spicy one. I can't say I'm all that surprised it was an attorney working for ICE, although the method of discovering who it was reeks of parallel construction.

It appears that Daniel Penny got hired by Andreessen Horowitz.

Good point, although I'd guess he actually had some merit to warrant the position.

Looks like he wasn’t in front of the car until she swirled around. Plus, the wife was yelling at her to drive.

“You wanna come at us?!”

Always so cringe when a woman LARPs as a badass, when if two male ICE agents indeed came at them they’d get stomped unless pussy passes were very generously provided, considering they’re quite non-central relative to the target market of women to whom such passes are usually afforded.

“I say you go get yourself some lunch, big boy”

Sounds like either an attempt at emasculating or bodyshaming from the type who’s generally against gender roles or bodyshaming. No bad tactics, only bad targets.

Overall, updating my priors further toward the upper right, with “fuck around” on the x-axis and “find out” on the y-axis.

And damn, by no means close to the most egregrious I’ve seen, but that photo that’s been circulating around of her appears to have been from quite a while ago and is quite flattering compared to IRL. Instagram vs. reality.

Always so cringe when a woman LARPs as a badass,

There is a particularly cringeworthy strain of white millennial woman who seems to believe that swearing a lot and listening to rap makes them an MMA champion.

Girlboss propaganda from academia and Hollywood doesn't help either.

It's oddly wholesome in a way. Reinventing the Millennial or Gen X douchebro "I just see red, and bodies start dropping"—such as recounted by Bas Rutten and/or Joe Rogan conversations—except turned-up to eleventy for women's delusions of grandeur as to their physical abilities.

I don't find this video particularly clarifying.

I am generally avoiding the discourse around this because I find it so tiresomely tribal and bad-faith on all sides. Rightists screeching that of course Good had it coming for (rationalizations/justifications-but-basically-because-she's-Other-Tribe), leftists screeching that this was murder because (ICE-is-fascist).

It's remarkable that people can look at very short video clips and conclude very firmly and confidently what was in the minds of both the driver and the ICE agent(s). I've watched all the videos from various angles and I have opinions, but I do not think anyone can honestly claim they know what the intentions, state of mind, or even level of awareness of any of the parties involved was. I think it's entirely possible that any of the following could be true (though I have opinions about their relative probability, I do not believe anyone who claims certainty, I think you're just matching your priors to a convenient conclusion):

(a) Good was intentionally trying to run the ICE agent over.

(b) Good panicked and hit the accelerator without thinking.

(c) Good was just trying to drive away and didn't even register there was an agent in the way.

(d) The ICE agent legitimately believed he was in mortal danger and shot someone he thought was trying to kill him.

(e) The ICE agent was a poorly-trained thug who shot a woman who defied his authority.

(f) This was a tragedy with no bad guys, Good panicked in a situation she shouldn't have been in, the ICE agent reacted on an adrenaline dump.

(f) Other variations.

Before your knee flexes and you start slamming your keyboard to argue any of these points, read again what I said: all of these are possible. I am not saying they are all equally likely. But if you say no, (a) or (b) or (c) or (f) are impossible or implausible, you're not being honest. You don't know. You can't read anyone's mind and you can't analyze what was going in in a split-second of video from "eye contact" or a swerve or which direction someone jumped or what someone shouts or mutters.

I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump. You probably think it was a good shoot if you hate immigrants and lesbian protesters, and you'd think it was a good shoot if there was video of the ICE agent literally walking up behind her and shooting her in the back of the head. You probably think it was a bad shoot if you hate Trump and ICE, and you'd think it was a bad shoot if there was video of Good shouting "I'm going to kill you!" before gunning it straight at a group of ICE screaming for her to stop.

Two observations about this particular video:

  1. I am pretty sure you can hear one of the agents muttering "Fucking bitch!" immediately after shooting. Make of that what you will. (Yes, yes, stop slamming your keyboard, it doesn't deserve the abuse- I agree that "Fucking bitch" is a fairly normal reaction if you think someone just tried to run you down. It's also a fairly normal reaction from an asshole power-tripping after some Karen shouted at him. Choose your screen.)
  2. As to people claiming it's AI, it doesn't look like generative AI to me, but we're quickly approaching the point where no one will be able to make statements like that with any certainty either.

I don't find this video particularly clarifying.

I found clarifying against the "she didn't even hit him/it was just a nudge" arguments. Helluva 'nudge.'

Otherwise agreed, and the people making those arguments aren't going to change for the reasons you mention.

Look, you drive a car directly at a cop while they're yelling at you to stop, you're gonna get shot. The footage doesn't change this. ICE is probably not the shining example of highly professional policing, but there's no police agency that wouldn't have shot her. Yes, she may have been trying to escape rather than kill him, but it doesn't change anything in practice. This woman made a very stupid decision and died for it.

ICE is probably not the shining example of highly professional policing

Honestly, I think they may be in the top 10%. Every time I hear about an atrocity and can find evidence, the worst I see is them being normal cop-aggressive. The big exception is when I heard about them shooting a reporter with a beanbag round. Turned out that happened... but it was actually LAPD, not ICE.

Look, you drive a car directly at a cop while they're yelling at you to stop, you're gonna get shot.

Agreed. And?

Let's say that Good was intentionally trying to run over the ICE agent and that the ICE agent legitimately believed in he was in mortal danger and shot someone he thought was trying to kill him. I don't think either claim is likely, but let's grant them for the sake of argument. I still don't think that justifies the shooting for two reasons, each of which is enough on its own to make a self-defence claim untenable.

The first is that shooting her could not have reasonably been expected to stop the car. He's right in front of it and as we saw in the other videos, it already had enough momentum to continue until she crashed into another car. That's only the first shot too. The second and third were fired from the side. He's not justified in shooting her to stop an imminent threat if it is unreasonable for him to think the shots might stop the imminent threat. And if I understand the law correctly, each shot has to be justified on its own. The second two shots cannot be justified on the grounds that the firing started when there was an imminent threat.

The second reason is that he went against his police training and placed himself in harm's way. I believe this goes against the training provided by the Department of Homeland Security. My understanding of the law is that you lose your right to claim self-defence if you wrecklessly put yourself into the dangerous situation that left yourself no option but to use deadly force.

It seems to me that any self-defence claim has to argue that it's reasonable for the ICE agent to make a poor split second decision about the risk the car posed because of how little time he had to think about it, while somehow not undermining the claim that it was reasonable for him to walk in front of the vehicle that he had so much trouble assessing the danger of. If it's inherently difficult to make a split second decision about whether the vehicle poses an imminent threat sufficient to justify killing the driver, that makes it all the more unreasonable to walk in front of the car in the first place. If it was reasonable to walk in front of the car and pull out his gun when it started moving, then he had to have been confident in his ability to make split second decisions that accurately determined the risk posed by the car moving towards him.

  • -15

The first is that shooting her could not have reasonably been expected to stop the car.

Even granting for the moment that this is true, there is not, in fact, an exception in self defense for futility.

And if I understand the law correctly, each shot has to be justified on its own.

A person defending themselves is not necessarily required to re-evaluate after each act. The three shots were fired within one second, during which he was hit by the vehicle. This applies to civilians in anti-gun states, even -- it was a point in the Bernie Goetz trial.

The second reason is that he went against his police training and placed himself in harm's way.

Even if true, this would not defeat self defense.

My understanding of the law is that you lose your right to claim self-defence if you wrecklessly put yourself into the dangerous situation that left yourself no option but to use deadly force.

There's no such law, even in Minneapolis.

The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode.

It is not enough for there to be a reasonable belief of an offence which exposes the actor to great bodily harm or death. The killing must be "necessary in resisting or preventing the offence".

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.065

A person defending themselves is not necessarily required to re-evaluate after each act. The three shots were fired within one second, during which he was hit by the vehicle. This applies to civilians in anti-gun states, even -- it was a point in the Bernie Goetz trial.

That isn't true. The person must continuously evaluate whether the threat is still there. Everything is based on the reasonableness standard. If the time was so short that it the person did not have time to reassess and notice that the car had passed, then he would not be guilty, but the permissibility of the first shot doesn't automatically excuse all subsequent shots. One second is enough time for him to notice the car passing. He had to be looking where he was shooting, especially as a police officer and would have to have seen that he was shooting through the side window. He had to turn his body to track her in order to aim the second and third shots at her. If he can process all that enough to successfully land those shots (assuming they contributed to her death), then he can make the conscious decision to stop shooting. He doesn't have to think about it carefully to figure out that a car driving away from him isn't a threat. It should be intuitive.

It's not as though the car had gone from heading right at him during the first shot to turning away within one second. Before he took his first shot, I would say about half a second, the car had already started turning away. He took his first shot from the side of the car, with most of his body well out of the cars path.

By the way, it does not appear that he was hit by the vehicle. There are a couple videos where it seems like he might have been. There is a low-quality video from far away where it's hard to make out what's going on where it appears he might have been pushed by the vehicle. But if you line it up in timing with the video from back of the car, you can see that that can't be what happened because at that moment, his torso well to the left of the car. It's already passing him by. What must be going on is that he's farther back than it appears he's pushing off with his hands. You can see in another video that he leads forward and onto the roof of the car, but that his torso is largely clear.

The cell phone video makes it look like he was hit, especially if, like many people, you think it's body cam footage. But you don't actually see anything at that point. You hear the car collide with the phone. It's probably just his hand holding the phone landing on the car. There is actually no way to tell from this video whether his body and the car make contact, because the phone is facing the sky at that point.

Even if true, this would not defeat self defense.

It absolutely would. Police officers are specifically trained not to deliberately put themselves into situations where lethal force is the only option. If a police officer goes against his training and then decides to use the time he could have used to get out of the way to pull out his gun, then he is not acting reasonably.

It is a general rule that the legal excuse of self-defense is available only to those who act honestly and in good faith. The rule requires (1) the absence of aggression or provocation on the part of the slayer; (2) the actual and honest belief of the slayer that he was in imminent danger of death, great bodily harm, or some felony and it was necessary to take the action he did; (3) the existence of reasonable grounds for such belief; and (4) the duty of the slayer to retreat or avoid the danger if reasonably possible.

https://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/supreme-court/1967/40004-1.html

It is not enough for there to be a reasonable belief of an offence which exposes the actor to great bodily harm or death. The killing must be "necessary in resisting or preventing the offence".

This is the special police officer use of force statute, not the regular self-defense one (which also applies). However, the conditions here are satisfied, since fleeing a peace officer (609.487) is an offense and shooting, while it may not have prevented him being hit, did stop that offense.

This is the special police officer use of force statute, not the regular self-defense one (which also applies).

I don't think that's correct. I don't see where it says it's limited to the police.

However, the conditions here are satisfied, since fleeing a peace officer (609.487) is an offense and shooting, while it may not have prevented him being hit, did stop that offense.

The offence is not fleeing the police. The offence would be hitting him with her car.

I don't think that's correct. I don't see where it says it's limited to the police.

Because you didn't bother to look even after having it pointed it out. 609.065 refers back to 609.06, which is all about the police.

The offence is not fleeing the police. The offence would be hitting him with her car.

609.065 would cover the fleeing. The fleeing was an "offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death".

Keeping your assumptions, she attacked a cop with a lethal weapon. Don't do that :shrug:

Why did she think resisting arrest was smart? Fight in court.

Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?

It's crazy that even with the given assumptions, there's no blamn on her actions. I think that's telling about your bias.

I'm defending anything that she did. I just don't think it's relevant.

Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?

Standard practice would be to approach the driver's side window and politely ask her to step out of the car. Even arresting her was not reasonable. She was blocking a lane of traffic. It's not a big deal. Just give her a ticket.

I'm not saying any of this is legally necessary, but they should have been more tactful about the whole thing. There are a lot of videos of ICE going around where they are unnecessarily aggressive with people. That is naturally going to make situations like these more dangerous.

But regardless of what they were trying to accomplish with her, no, it is absolutely a stupid idea to stand in front of the car. That accomplishes nothing. The only reason one could give for doing that would be to prevent her from leaving. But that's only reasonably if you are highly confident that she's not going to run you over, which completely undermines any self-defence claim. And even in that case, police officers are told not to do that because it's dangerous.

Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?

I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. That's absolutely a preferrable outcome than what happened. So are you saying that it's better they kill her than let her get away? It isn't legal for them to do that, as frustrating as it may seem. Minnesota does not have the death penalty for evading arrest.

So, while I don't think that they needed to approach from ten feet away and do nothing when she fled, if you genuinely think that and killing her were the only two options, I don't see how that justifies killing her.

The first is that shooting her could not have reasonably been expected to stop the car.

Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.

And if I understand the law correctly, each shot has to be justified on its own.

Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second. See my other reply here.

Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.

Of course it does.

The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode.

Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.

Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second.

I'm not sure what to say other than I think it's absurd to suggest people have reaction times that are that slow. In that second he was able to track the vehicle as it turned and away, maintaining his aim as his line of sight moved from the side of the windshield over to the side of the car. The only thing his brain needed to process was the fact that he was at the side of the car. I don't think it takes anything close to a full second to visually process where an object is.

If it really were split seconds, then I would buy this argument, but I've watched the video many times and I think he had lots of time to process the situation. I don't even think the first shot was justifiable, so he only had that much more time to process the second shots. It's not the case that once the first shot was justifiable, the subsequent shots are automatically justfiable if they are close enough together. Each shot needs to be justified based on the totality of the circumstances, which includes the amount of processing he had done before the firing of the first shot.

I just think this requires a remarkable amount of leeway for how slow his processing is allowed to be to say he was justified in firing at that point, but I'm not sure how to prove that.

Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.

It says "resisting or preventing" an offense, not just preventing an offense. Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?

I've watched the video many times

This is the problem right here. You get to watch it as many times as you want, while he can only go through the situation one time. If he was able to replay the situation exactly as it played out, I'm sure he could have made decisions that didn't involve shooting her. But it's like, well, have you ever played video games? Have you ever made all the right decisions in the game on the first try? No, you don't. You die in the game a lot and only beat the game after several attempts at playing the exact same situations over and over again. But of course, real life is not a video game, and when someone's life is on the line it's justified for them to use deadly force in response to an imminent deadly threat, even if you can make an argument that they didn't have to (because you can always make that argument for every scenario under the sun).

I think he had lots of time to process the situation

Obviously he had enough time, because he was able to draw his gun and use it. If she had an instant kill-death laser controlled by her brain, or something, even the fastest draw in the West wouldn't be able to stop her. But no, I don't think that's what you mean. I think you're saying that he had lots of time to process the situation and choose a decision that didn't involve shooting her (or shooting her less), which I think is flat-out incorrect.

Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?

No, I don't.

This is the problem right here. You get to watch it as many times as you want, while he can only go through the situation one time. If he was able to replay the situation exactly as it played out, I'm sure he could have made decisions that didn't involve shooting her.

I don't need to watch it to think about what I would have done in that situation. I only need to have watched it to figure out what he would have already known having been there.

You die in the game a lot and only beat the game after several attempts at playing the exact same situations over and over again. But of course, real life is not a video game, and when someone's life is on the line it's justified for them to use deadly force in response to an imminent deadly threat, even if you can make an argument that they didn't have to (because you can always make that argument for every scenario under the sun).

Being a police officer is not like playing a video game. You are not supposed to put yourself into dangerous situations where people's lives are on the line unneccessarily. You are supposed to do what you can to avoid those situations. Video games are designed to have high rates of failure. Policing is not.

His training and situational awareness should have been sufficient for him to avoid killing anyone in the vast majority of similar situations. He should have taken steps to make the situation as safe as possible.

No, I don't.

Why not?

I don't need to watch it to think about what I would have done in that situation. I only need to have watched it to figure out what he would have already known having been there.

You keep thinking that he would have known more than what a reasonable officer put in his same position would have known. My point was that perhaps watching it multiple times biases you to see certain things as obvious and known when they were not.

Being a police officer is not like playing a video game.

I agree! But if you're saying this, then you don't seem to appreciate my point enough, so let me rephrase. He only gets to go through the situation once, he does not get to do it again. You, however, get to watch it multiple times. You are the one who is playing a video game. And, for that matter, everyone who is discussing this situation (including me). It's why I discount a lot of things in the videos that may seem "obvious" to you, because I can't imagine that I could do any better were I to be placed in the same position and didn't know what was going to happen. If I knew how everything was going to play out, I could definitely handle the situation without using deadly force. But if I had to go through it for the first time and had no idea what she was going to do? I don't think so.

Imagine if all knowledge of this event was erased and you had to watch the video again for the first time. Do you really think that you would have noticed all the things in the video that you argue he should have known? Do you notice these sorts of details in any video you watch for the first time? There's that famous experiment of the gorilla walking by in the background of a video of people playing basketball, and people (focused on counting the number of passes) consistently fail to notice the gorilla. You seem to think that you could notice the gorilla, if you watched the video for the first time without knowing that there was going to be a gorilla. Is that right?

My understanding of the law is that you lose your right to claim self-defence if you wrecklessly put yourself into the dangerous situation that left yourself no option but to use deadly force.

Aside from your other misunderstandings of self defense law, standing in front of a stationary car is not recklessly putting yourself in a dangerous situation.

Then why are the police told not to do it? What does it accomplish? If it was reasonable for him to think he was going to die the second the car started moving, how is that consistent with the idea that it wasn't reckless to stand there?

Even shooting her did not prevent the car from coming at him. Lots of his defenders are arguing that he was both at imminent risk of severe bodily harm or death and that the car did in fact hit him, even though he shot her three times. If we grant that, then we have to admit that he was doing something very dangerous.

The police are allowed to do dangerous things, but not without sufficient purpose to justify the risk. What was accomplished by putting himself in that position? If we grant everything necessary to say that it was reasonable for him to be there, then what he must have been doing was helping to detain her by creating a situation where she could not flee without giving him an excuse to kill her. The police are explicitly told not to do that, and the outcome of this event shows exactly why.

The law is not actually set up to create death traps for those who don't cooperate with the police. Self-defence law revolves around preventing death, not around giving the police sufficient excuse to kill so as to induce cooperation.

By the way, the car was not stationary. It was backing up while he placed himself in front of it and then stopped for less than a second before moving forward. He knew she was being uncooperative and heard her wife telling her to drive away. He should have known what was about to happen and seemed to anticipate it when he moved his phone to his left hand and then drew his gun.

Then why are the police told not to do it?

Health and safety

What does it accomplish?

Reduces lost-time accidents and cuts down on paperwork.

If it was reasonable for him to think he was going to die the second the car started moving, how is that consistent with the idea that it wasn't reckless to stand there?

Undertaking a calculated risk is not inherently reckless. If it were, police would never engage in any interactions. The overwhelming majority of people do not in fact drive their vehicles at police.

Things that are safe in the parking lot of a grocery store are not necessarily safe during the apprehension of a suspect. I have seen people argue here that we can not conclude from the fact that Good was a middle-aged woman who engaged in what appeared to prefer non-violent, if annoying and illegal actions to impede ICE that she was not going to suddenly to draw a gun to kill as many ICE officers as she could.

We know from the videos that Ross shooting her did very little to slow down her car. If she had aimed for him, even if he had managed to shoot her, he would have been severely injured.

So objectively speaking, standing too close to dodge in front of suspect's car is in fact reckless, even if you do not have reason to believe that that suspect might consider you Gestapo, or might be panicking or might be distracted and not even have seen you. This is why for example the CBP has explicit rules about not doing that.

I'd agree it's risky, but not reckless. People should generally be free to act under the assumption that someone will not try to murder them under any circumstance that they are not immediately threatening the lives of others. I have no interest in bending social convention to accommodate the homicidal.

But he didn't act under that assumption or else he would not have shot her. What is not reasonable is to assume that someone in the process of backing up while a police officer yells at her repeatedly to get out of her car and while her wife tells her to drive away, is not about to drive away, but also to think that if she does drive away that it will be a murder attempt.

I have no interest in bending social convention to accommodate the homicidal.

What social convention is being bent? That police can always assume no one will try to hurt them? How is that social convention consistent with their carrying guns?

The convention should be that any person should be able to assume that someone will not try to murder them.

I strongly disagree that this is some symmetric tribal partisan thing (while agreeing with the premise that yes, many things boil down to that in the general case)

When I watch the videos, I don't jump to a firm position on "what was in the minds of both [parties]". Some things I'm unsure about:

  • Did she register the driver in front of the car? Her eyes flicked over him, but it's possible she didn't see him, or didn't notice him, though I doubt it
  • If she did register him, did she deliberately try and run him over? I suspect: no, but she considered it an acceptable (and satisfying) side effect
  • Was the ICE agent poorly trained? Maybe, maybe not. Seems much less important than about 10 other factors that more directly relate to what actually happened
  • Did he genuinely fear for his life? I expect so, but I'm not a mind reader. Either way, 1 second is a very short time to form a coherent fear vs reacting to an immediate threat

So yeah, I haven't jumped to a strong conclusion about exactly what anyone was thinking in the moment. What I'm certain of is this:

  • From rest, the driver backed up her 1.5-ton SUV and accelerated towards the ICE agent

That's instantly disqualifying. Nothing else needed; I'm not assuming anything about anyone's mindset. If you are a wearing a 1.5-ton suit of power armour with wheels, you cannot suddenly accelerate at another human being. You can't.

That's all it boils down to. It doesn't matter if you don't reach high speeds. If you hit him, there's a high chance he's going under. Given that he's close to the side of the car, he's probably going under the tires. So yeah, that's him dead. Even if he doesn't go under, you can pretty trivially die just from smashing your head on the ground. So whether or not it was a "good" shoot, was it acceptable for him to make the shot in the 1 second she gave him to decide how much he valued his life? Yes, absolutely.

So, I don't care whether she intended to run him over, or if (as I think is most likely) she wanted to get away, but considered knocking him over to be acceptably within the range of outcomes.

I'm not happy this happened. It's a tragedy. IIRC she had kids, which makes this more tragic -- unlike her, they played no part in creating this horrible outcome. But I won't lilypad from "it's a tragedy" to "anyone physically involved was in the wrong". She created this situation, and I wish she hadn't. "Do not drive forward when there's a person directly in front of you" is a simple, clear rule that would have kept everyone safe

I hope you don't think I'm a mindkilled Trump-loving lesbian-hater or whatever slamming my keyboard. This just doesn't seem like a tribal split thing; it's a case where actually, the truth of the matter has extremely strong video evidence, and one tribe chooses to ignore that. (I'll also note: each successive video smashes through a different set of anti-ICE excuses, e.g. "she was just a random bystander turning around!", "the wheels were never pointing at him", "he put himself in front of the vehicle!", "she was panicking!" etc -- there's no equivalent the other way.)

I hope you don't think I'm a mindkilled Trump-loving lesbian-hater or whatever slamming my keyboard. This just doesn't seem like a tribal split thing; it's a case where actually, the truth of the matter has extremely strong video evidence, and one tribe chooses to ignore that.

What is the truth you are so confident about? That she wasn't there accidentally? That she was trying to kill the ICE officer? That there was no misconduct or poor judgment? You're sure? Really, really sure? 100% sure?

You do seem to recognize the uncertaintiess, whether or not our conclusions are the same. (And you don't even know what why my conclusions are. Hell, right now I'm not sure what my conclusions are.)

My point is that I believe the majority of people commenting, and currently making earnest statements about how certain they are about the truth, would argue the exact opposite position, given the same evidence, if the tribal polarities were reversed.

In other words, everyone who says they are looking at the available video evidence to try to come to an informed conclusion--

I don't believe them*.

(FWIW, I mostly didn't believe anyone was even attempting to be honest during the Floyd and Rittenhouse cases either. I believe them even less now.)

(* "Them" meaning the vast majority. Not literally every single person with an opinion. Go ahead and assume you are an exception.)

That she wasn't there accidentally?

You'd have to believe everyone that knows her, including her wife, is lying to believe there's a chance she was there accidentally. Weird one to include in your list of uncertainties; that she was there deliberately to interfere is like the second-most confident thing anyone can state about this situation.

(FWIW, I mostly didn't believe anyone was even attempting to be honest during the Floyd and Rittenhouse cases either. I believe them even less now.)

I hope this isn't getting too recursive, but what do/did you think about the Rittenhouse case?

I'm reluctant to answer both because clearly you want to use it as a litmus test, and because I don't want to start a Rittenhouse subthread, but as I said at the time, I think he was a twerpy hero-wannabe who didn't need to be there, but in the situation he found himself in, he acted in self-defense.

you want to use it as a litmus test

I was legitimately just curious.

meta comment: as a long-time lurker just commenting now, I'm generally a big fan of how you mod (and comment) -- given that I'm criticising/arguing with you, I should take a moment to say thanks for maintaining this space. It's valuable and good.

Meanwhile, in the fray:

What is the truth you are so confident about?

I tried pretty hard to outline exactly what this was. There are bullet points for the features I was uncertain about, largely around their states of mind, and a single bullet point that was the single truth I'm confident of -- specifically, that she accelerated an SUV directly at another human being, and this is an act that can easily kill people.

I think I went overboard on making this clear -- idk how I could've laid it out in a way that would short-circuit this question.

That she wasn't there accidentally? That she was trying to kill the ICE officer? That there was no misconduct or poor judgment? You're sure? Really, really sure? 100% sure?

No; no; no; no; no; no.

I specifically outlined "these are the things I'm uncertain of", "these are the things I'm certain of". What part of that makes you think "this is a person who thinks maximally ICEpilled chud takes, and needs to be deprogrammed"? I don't need to be introduced to the concept of less-than-100%-certainty, after a post in which (I'm pretty sure) I made a pretty clear attempt to delineate exactly which things I was confident in.

Though it's not directly relevant, here are my answers to your questions. I believe:

  • She wasn't there accidentally (99% certain)
  • Medium strong probability -- she wasn't trying to kill the officer; she very probably considered any injury/death justified in making her escape; she probably wanted him dead in the abstract, if not willing to do it herself (but would be happy to learn she'd caused it, assuming she would get away with it). Still, I doubt she marshalled all of these as a coherent thought before gunning the accelerator.
  • Was there misconduct? In the legal sense, idk state or federal law, sorry. In everyday terms: no, I think the protesters acted abominably, and ICE acted reasonably.
  • Was there poor judgment? From the protesters, yes. From ICE: I don't think so, but if there's a specific instance of poor judgment, I'm happy to discuss it
  • "You're sure?" -- I've tried to put confidence levels on each claim
  • "Really, really sure?" -- no; see previous
  • "100% sure?" -- again

I don't think that was a fair line of implications to throw at me. I've tried to be pretty clear in what parts I'm confident in, and what parts are more ambiguous.

And you don't even know what why my conclusions are

True! And that's fine. My conclusions don't depend on yours, or vice versa. I won't blame you for disagreeing/agreeing with me. Again, I'm just talking about what I saw in the actual physical pixels of the video, which show a person driving a 1.5-ton metal machine towards a fragile human body -- that's the point of my comment. Trying to do theory of mind on each other is overcomplicating things.

My point is that I believe the majority of people commenting ... would argue the exact opposite position ... if the tribal polarities were reversed.

Yeah, I broadly agree that this is the state of society in general. I think the Motte, while susceptible to the same dynamic, is much much better (but still flawed! And we're all still human!)

Like, for me personally: I don't live in the US. ICE and US immigration are not directly applicable to me. I don't particularly like Trump, or Biden, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, etc etc. While I'm deeply frustrated with wokeness, I am actually capable of noticing situations where the stopped clock is right twice a day. (Tho even that phrasing is uncharitable, as a stopped clock is wrong by coincidence; occasionally, woke-type arguments are actually correct on their own merits).

You're not entirely wrong, it's just a bit too blackpilled for me to go "everyone is just choosing along tribal lines". Free to disagree, obviously; I just don't think this is the situation where that's the takeaway.

Go ahead and assume you are an exception.

While recognising that you do a ton of work (and produce a ton of content) in the Motte, while I'm basically a newcomer outside of lurking -- dude, come on. I don't think anything I said calls for this kind of (mild) hostility.

I do not think I am some special butterfly. As I'm pretty sure my previous comment implies, and as the existence of the Motte might imply, I believe that there are plenty of people capable of determining their beliefs based on evidence and truth. (If not, what the heck is everyone doing here?)

As an easy example, check out quantumfreakonomic's comment (idk how to tag a user, sorry) concerning Ashley Babbit below, who seems to be the locus of discussion around a "flipped parity" shooting:

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.

Based on a quick scan of quantum's other comments on this topic, that seems like an example of one person not dividing along tribal lines?

In other words, everyone who says they are looking at the available video evidence to try to come to an informed conclusion-- I don't believe them*.

Well, ok, but then you're just going to be wrong about some people. You need a finer brush. Yes, many people aren't trying to come to an informed conclusion (probably most). But everyone? No, that's just wrong. And I think there's a real problem with trying to implicitly label objections to that as a claim to higher status ("go ahead and assume you are an exception"). People genuinely do differ, some people try harder than others, we are all fallible. If no one here is trying to find the truth -- which I strongly disagree with -- then idk the point of the Motte, exactly.

I specifically outlined "these are the things I'm uncertain of", "these are the things I'm certain of". What part of that makes you think "this is a person who thinks maximally ICEpilled chud takes, and needs to be deprogrammed"?

I don't. I didn't say that about you (nor have I "called out" anyone specifically). I specifically noted that you recognized the uncertainties (and I avoided getting into where I disagreed with you on specifics).

idk how to tag a user, sorry

@ in front of their username.

... is the rule here that we're allowed to call large swatches of people out as inconsistent without evidence, but just not search through someone's post history to show it for specific individuals who do have that evidence?

Are you disputing that broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, complaining that you think it's against the rules (or should be) to say broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, arguing that only one side is inconsistent and demanding evidence that the other side is also inconsistent, or just asking permission to try to gotcha someone?

I'll take the last option, if it's on the table. But it's not my point. Similarly, I can and have written long top-level digressions on motivated reasoning reason and its failure modes, both on the right and the left; I can highlight other top-level posters today who're pretty clearly not caring about whether what they say is true or not. But whether it's present in general isn't my point, either, and it wasn't the claim you dived in with.

My point is that I believe the majority of people commenting, and currently making earnest statements about how certain they are about the truth, would argue the exact opposite position, given the same evidence, if the tribal polarities were reversed.

(FWIW, I mostly didn't believe anyone was even attempting to be honest during the Floyd and Rittenhouse cases either. I believe them even less now.)

There are claims about a specific thing.

They aren't testable claims. There's no number of doubts in the first days of the Rittenhouse case, or situations like Arbery or Steven Ray Baca (or Babbit!) cases where the same posters have been either ambivalent or opposed to their supposed co-partisans, or others where people were willing to consider the alternative explanations for their supposed enemies. I can show myself literally writing "I'm reserving judgment on this whole thing til we get the bodycam". Doesn't matter, you threw an asterisk on at the last minute, done.

The 'what if the shoe were on the other foot' arguments write themselves. Would you consider it more acceptable were I to dive into a conversation saying, well, I don't think you're being blatantly dishonest, but darwin was three years ago? Because I don't particularly want to do that, but if it's permitted I at least need to consider what responses are available to it.

It wouldn't bug me as much you actually confronted the main truth that the other writer literally spelled out as their major update from the story ("From rest, the driver backed up her 1.5-ton SUV and accelerated towards the ICE agent"). ((or if your examples of things we Can't Be Sure of did not include multiple in strong contradiction with the evidence: so far the best example of motivated reasoning you've given is you)).

But as is, it seems like an epitome of "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table". Regardless of whether it's in the rules or not, what do you think you're even arguing here?

Regardless of whether it's in the rules or not, what do you think you're even arguing here?

What do you think I'm arguing here?

That's an honest question, because you seem to be accusing me of "pounding the table" for a particular argument, when I have not taken a side on Reed at all, other than gesturing at what I consider to be a number of possibilities, which I explicitly stated were not equally probable.

I infer from your post that you have slotted me into the "anti-ICE, pro-Reed" side, and are seeing everything I post through that lens. Which is what most people do, because if you don't immediately and vigorously sneer and cheer for the right side you're clearly carrying water for the other. This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now.

If you really wanted to know what I think specifically about any given proposition, you could ask. But people don't do that, they just assume.

My argument is that most of the people on both sides are guilty of motivated reasoning and would change positions if the tribes were reversed, if Reed had been MAGA and Ashli Babbit had been woke. You shouldn't be confused about this, because that's what I said in plain English. But instead you seem to be trying to dig for my unstated tribal priors. You think you know what they are, and you don't.

What do you think I'm arguing here?

I think you're arguing that :

I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump.

And, by conjunction, that people's current assessments are at minimum overconfident or not based on available facts on this particular case. If you can't be bothered to defend it or provide evidence about other people's assessments -- or even highlight the specific ones you think are overconfident and how! -- I don't particularly care what those underlying positions are, and I'm certainly not going to speak on them. There's a fun space for Bulverism, and I'm trying to resist it, and I'm definitely not going to consider it useful to spell out.

And I know you know I didn't speak on your ground-level positions, or make claims about your underlying biases or perceptions related to this particular shooting, because you would have quoted me if I did.

The claim of motivated reasoning could be defended. I don't think it's a particularly strong one in this case, but I haven't exactly had time to evaluate a ton of the evidence for or against. You know what you haven't done? Present any evidence that the poster you responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence. Instead we get hypotheticals that don't exist.

I could debate those! LaVoy Finicum has more overlap with Good than Babbit does, in that they weren't anywhere near a federal politician, they were doing a pretty overtly illegal protest of the type that no one really expects to get arrested nevermind shot over, they had a deadly weapon but it was contestable whether they were a 'real' threat to life before the first bullet rather than just doing something incredibly stupid that could hurt someone, yada yada.

It'd be a useless debate -- Red Tribers could quite aptly point to the many ways the Feds pushed before and misbehaved after the shooting, Blue Tribers can (and regularly do) just say Guns Are Different -- but before we even get there, we have to confront the bit where Finicum wasn't a Red Tribe cause celebre. Not even here. Literally, in the sense that the only person to ever use his name on this site other than me was to say "No one cares." (tbf, two indirect references, [ed: one of which I can't find now]). He had eight mentions in the entire history of TheMotte over at Reddit, four of them were me being ambivalent, and the here's the other four. Nobody's certain from day one that Finicum must be innocent, and that his shooter must be hanged.

But it doesn't matter that it's useless, if that's what it takes to avoid someone pretending "This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now", while being more insistent to actual bring an actual specific fault of analysis than the broad majority of people you're criticizing. Does it matter for that analysis?

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I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump.

Gotta say this is a pretty shitty thing to hear from a mod. This is the Culture War thread. There's going to be politicized views and pre-existing bias brought in, sure. I think the Motte is one of the places were people do a pretty good job of laying their cards on the table up front. The effort-posts then do a great job of laying out various positions. To say generally, however, that they don't consider evidence is not only wrong but wronheaded - it demonstrates so mal intent.

My sense is that most (non-Blue Tribe) posters agree and concede that the video evidence here is not as exculpatory as the video evidence for Kyle Rittenhouse was. To me, this suggests that there is reasonable degree of nuance to the thinking here. I'm pretty sure that in Left-controlled spaces, people are just as sure that this shooter was in the wrong as they were about Kyle Rittenhouse.

Mods are, in fact, allowed to have opinions about posters and posting quality, and while generally the caliber of discussion here is higher than most places on the Internet, you're kidding yourself if you think the same bad habits seen on reddit and X aren't also present here.

C is impossible given this footage

She glances up twice. Once while backing up and a second time right before she starts driving forward. The first glance occurred while the police was quickly walking across the front of the car. Had the police officer kept walking, he would have been clear of the car when she stopped backing up. But while she's looking down, he stops right in front of her on the driver's side, which means she likely only knew where he was standing after looking up the second time and may not have expected anyone to be in the way.

I wouldn't say impossible, see inattentional blindness. There are a lot of people driving cars that shouldn't be driving cars but do because you kind of need a car to get anywhere in most of the US.

It certainly doesn't help the side that wants to say she had absolutely no awareness, and does help the side that wants to argue she wanted to run him over intentionally. But also, this happens in a matter of seconds, and I'd think someone with the intention of trying to run over ICE with a car would've done it a different way, and invoking Occum's razor I think the answer that she was being wreckless, and a bad driver is more likely than she saw an opportunity to run over an ICE officer and made a split second decision to run him over.

Come on man, surely you’ve seen leftists presenting a story like this: “Lady and her partner were on the way home from dropping off their kid at school. They make a wrong turn and completely accidentally end up in the middle of an ICE operation. Agents begin shouting confusing orders including “turn around.” Lady is panicked, tries to comply and do a 3 point turn, agent deliberately positions himself in front of her car and murders her.”

This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online and this convincingly debunks every one of those points. This isn’t some “two screens” rationalist bullshit, this is like Nicholas Sandmann, there is a straightforward lie and there is the truth.

You can still accept this video and say the shot was unjustified, but to say this doesn’t clarify anything just isn’t true

This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online

This seems like a strong claim to make without evidence. Extraordinarily popular, really? I'm sure you can find a few people posting such things but it feels like a massive weak man. Certainly I haven't seen such a narrative much at all in places like Reddit and other left wing spaces.

This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online and this convincingly debunks every one of those points. This isn’t some “two screens” rationalist bullshit, this is like Nicholas Sandmann, there is a straightforward lie and there is the truth.

Yeah, in this situation the Leftists remind me of a defense attorney who reviews the evidence and, on behalf of his client, fabricates the most pro-client narrative that the evidence will permit.

You're being overly charitable. They are certainly not limited to what the evidence will permit.

You're being overly charitable. They are certainly not limited to what the evidence will permit.

In a sense, they are. I agree that they will spin and twist and lie very aggressively, but there are still limits. So for example, suppose this Good woman turned out to have posted on social media that she really would like to run over an ICE agent in her SUV. Leftists might claim that this was faked somehow. And if a video came out of her saying the same thing, they might claim it was AI-generated. And so on, but eventually they would change tack. Perhaps they would argue that this evidence is irrelevant because the ICE agent was unaware of it.

And of course sometimes evidence comes out which is so overwhelming that the Left does stop doubling down and instead gives up -- not by conceding that they were wrong but instead by just quietly dropping the subject and pretending the whole incident never happened.

Based on literally this thread, I think they would instead just decline to acknowledge that any such social media post existed. If confronted with it, they would ignore the claim, or vanish and reappear elsewhere to continue making the exact same claims without updating on the new evidence to any degree.

And of course sometimes evidence comes out which is so overwhelming that the Left does stop doubling down and instead gives up -- not by conceding that they were wrong but instead by just quietly dropping the subject and pretending the whole incident never happened.

This is at least honest, and I don't hold it against anyone for bowing out of discussion of a Happening where their preferred side looks bad.

This is at least honest, and I don't hold it against anyone for bowing out of discussion of a Happening where their preferred side looks bad.

I tend to disagree with this, at least in some situations. For example, when the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax took place, a lot of Duke professors and students publicly condemned the men who had been falsely accused. A few national newspapers jumped on the bandwagon. In my view a public apology and some soul-searching was in order.

I tend to disagree with this, at least in some situations. For example, when the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax took place, a lot of Duke professors and students publicly condemned the men who had been falsely accused. A few national newspapers jumped on the bandwagon. In my view a public apology and some soul-searching was in order.

Absolutely. I meant more any faculty who saw the situation, intuited where it truly ended up, and chose to remain silent. If you've already taken a strong stance, then yeah, you need to openly conform to reality if you want to retain any respect.

But if someone chooses not to engage with a situation in the first place, I'm not going to hold it against them. Every position that everyone holds has at least some evidence against it, or example that makes them look bad. You don't have to go to the mats, die with the lie, go all in for every single one. You can just look at your cards and fold the hand. There's a whole lot of poker left.

Yes, this is what happens when "My outgroup is evil" is straight up not allowed. When you can't just go "Well, they've lied about literally everything the last 15 years of my life... so I'm just going to assume the worst about them this time."

Obviously every narrative about this shooting from the left was going to be a lie. Did we already forget the cloud of bullshit they kicked up attempting to claim the Kirk shooter was MAGA? The weeks people spent here giving time to lies that were obvious immediately, irrefutable days later, and still trying to be "charitable" to obvious liars wondering in here weeks later from new accounts to discuss if Kirk's shooter was actually MAGA.

I'm reminded, ironically, of one of Sam Harris' criticisms of Donald Trump. Which is that, if he tells 1000 lies, just completely thoughtlessly, maybe 10 seconds per lie, and it takes you 2 hours to disprove each one... Donald Trump still wins because he wasted minutes of his life on the effort and you wasted days if not weeks or months.

So this is me weighing in finally. I don't understand why anybody even entertained a leftist narrative when the obvious reality is that this woman chose every step of this encounter, and fucked around and found out. She was not innocent, confused, wrong place wrong time, panicked, any of it. She's a brainwashed lesbian activist who thought she could run down an ICE agent because she's on the right side of history and Democrats have been telling her she can for years now. She doesn't deserve charity, the people creating fog of war do not deserve charity, evil actually exists no matter how much you claim it's against the rules to discuss.

To say nothing of Tim Walz having every appearance of being willing to cross the Rubicon because the Feds are finally going after his fraud kickbacks. Which is rich after having been beat over the head with "Insurrectionist" for 4 years.

There are no offramps or political solutions. It's between you, your God and your conscience your level of involvement in what's coming. I pray that keeping your head in the sand works out for most of you.

Yes, this is what happens when "My outgroup is evil" is straight up not allowed.

So let me ask you two genuine questions (and to forestall any objections or claims that I am trying to "bait" you-which I have never done, contrary to your repeated assertions- I swear that even if you take this opportunity to insult me in whatever fashion you wish, I grant you immunity):

  1. Is it your genuine sincere belief that every single person identified as being "on the left" is an evil liar? That it's literally impossible for anyone to be a Democrat or a liberal and sincere and well-intentioned?

  2. If we allowed some of those anti-MAGA posters who wander in to post like you do, would you be okay with that, or are you explicitly advocating we make the Motte a "leftists fuck-off" space?

Because the point of not allowing people to just post "My outgroup is evil" is not that no evil people exist or that you cannot believe your enemies are evil. The point is that if people just post how much they hate their enemies with no nuance, context, or argument, we will just have people screaming at each other and competing for who can sneer most dramatically - unless we are just all circle-jerking each other about who our enemies are.

As an actual literal statement the political left is committed to violating black letter constitutional civil rights protections that they justify by inventing human rights, yes, that's a very defensible statement. The adults in the room in the Biden admin(and there were some- not Biden and Kamala, but figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland were powerful enough on their own to count) were mostly moderate, establishment, center-left types and not crazy radicals and they... just let the country fall apart while they pursued failed attempts at political vengeance and power consolidation. The war on domestic terror was just full of oversteps that make no sense except as retribution against dissidents against state ideology, the novel legal theories, etc. Meanwhile actual competent governance was... not a priority. The null hypothesis for both a Biden admin and a vegetable in the white house is that technocrats from his own party run the country in a not-cartoonish manner with some featherbedding.

Trump talks about some of this stuff. But he doesn't actually do it.

Is it your genuine sincere belief that every single person identified as being "on the left" is an evil liar? That it's literally impossible for anyone to be a Democrat or a liberal and sincere and well-intentioned?

I think they do evil. I think at this point to be a Democrat is to be deeply committed to doing evil. The hills Democrats have chosen to die on (castrating children, giving billions in fraud to immigrants of questionable legality, forcing people to take experimental medications, mass censorship) are virtually unrecognizable from the Democrats of 30 years ago. All the good ones left the party and joined the Republican ticket. Which is probably why so many high ranking positions in Trump's administration got filled with former Democrats (RFK Jr, Tulsi).

I have in laws who are deeply committed Democrats, deeply committed to destroying the country. They don't think of it that way. They are hopelessly, and willfully, ignorant of the consequences of their policies. If "Evil" had a version of "without intent" like manslaughter, they'd be that. All the same...

If we allowed some of those anti-MAGA posters who wander in to post like you do, would you be okay with that, or are you explicitly advocating we make the Motte a "leftists fuck-off" space?

If they were honest. I only care about honesty. They may view me as evil, for caring about my heritage, and wanting it to continue to exist. For not wanting billions of 3rd worlders enshittifying my homeland. For the very fact that my ancestors conquered this nation in the first place. And these are the exact reasons these differences can only be sorted out finally. I cannot exist in their world, and they cannot exist in mine. We are mutually evil to one another. I find their morality an abhorrent inversion of proper morals, and they feel the same. I can recognize this however, and accept that it's all over now but the violence. We cannot coexist.

But only if they are honest. If they stroll in here like Darwin of yore, playing Arguments as Soldiers, refusing to be pinned down, refusing to ever admit what the negative space around their rhetoric is gesturing towards, fuck em.

Which goes straight to it, and you see this over and over and over again. The leftist always calibrates their speech towards maximum fog of war. Among their own it's "Yes, I want to destroy the white race." but then in public it's "Oh why can't we have sympathy for the 65 IQ serial rapist an NGO imported from Africa? He just needs more restorative justice. That 3 year old probably won't even remember what happened to it." Which also goes straight to why LibsOfTiktok went so viral. These people just put all that nonsense out there, under their real ass names, employment in bio, and thought they were the victims when people outside their bubble saw it. Because, like Hillary Clinton famously said, sometimes you have two sets of opinions, a public set and a private set. It was an invasion of privacy to see their private opinions... even when they posted them publicly.

Do you believe your in-laws literally want you dead and your daughter transed?

I suspect not. (If you do- well, I don't know what to say except that must make things tense at Christmas.) This is the problem with such absolute statements.

Do you believe your in-laws literally want you dead and your daughter transed?

I suspect not.

Wrong question. People love to abstract evil away into mustache-twirling schemes to deliberately do harm, so they never have to face the evil in their own hearts. Evil isn't doing a "paperclip optimizer" routine, but for double mastectomies, it's convincing yourself your cause is so good, that you can, say, lie to promote / defend it because the chuds would """weaponize""" the truth.

What you want to ask in the case of his in-laws is, if his daughter said she's trans and he opposed it, would they hear him out, or write him off as a transphobe? Or for the "want him dead" part: if the cancel mob came after him, would they defend his character, or throw him under the bus (or for a borderline case: squirm like Alec Holowka's sister, hinting at the truth, but refusing to state it outright for fear of the mob going after her as well)?

Do you believe your in-laws literally want you dead and your daughter transed?

No, but they literally keep voting for local politicians who have that as their party platform. They just... I donno, refuse to grapple with that part of things.

Declaring someone a mortal irreconcilable enemy provides them with the best possible reason to stop being honest with you, or trying. There is no honor to be won being honest with moral aliens.

Well yes. Thats another reason i hate my enemies. They don't even have the descency to admit it and have a fair fight. Its just gas lighting about their naked aggression 24/7.

What did you think being mortal enemies was? Essays? Vibes?

According to you, someone who you declared should literally be wiped out as the only reconciliation is supposed to be decent to you?

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I realize these questions are directed at someone else, but I feel like answering them:

Is it your genuine sincere belief that every single person identified as being "on the left" is an evil liar?

Pretty much yes. It's become an evil ideology. People who adhere to evil ideologies are -- to a greater or lesser extent -- evil themselves.

That it's literally impossible for anyone to be a Democrat or a liberal and sincere and well-intentioned?

I think that's a slightly different question, since, generally speaking, people are very good at self-deception. I think there are plenty of (evil) Leftists who genuinely and sincerely believe in the lies they spread and genuinely and sincerely believe that they are trying to make the world a better place.

If we allowed some of those anti-MAGA posters who wander in to post like you do, would you be okay with that, or are you explicitly advocating we make the Motte a "leftists fuck-off" space?

Personally, I'm fine with Leftists posting here since (at least for now) they cannot engage in their usual tactics of shouting down their opposition; ideologically capturing the moderation team and abusing those powers to silence their adversaries; etc.

How are you defining "left"? By the standards of the Motte, I am on the left. (I'm more likely to vote Democrat than not, I don't like Trump, I think *-isms are bad, etc.) So does this make me "evil" or do I not count because I'm sufficiently gray? (Go ahead and call me evil if you insist, I am genuinely trying to figure out how you are modeling other minds.)

Personally, I'm fine with Leftists posting here since (at least for now) they cannot engage in their usual tactics of shouting down their opposition

Okay, but that necessarily means we don't let you shout them down either.

I think *-isms are bad

Hey now, that moved to the right over the last 10 years. Official left position has long been that -isms are good, as long as they target the right groups.

No, the "official left position" has long been that behavior that would be classified as a *-ism when targeting groups they support isn't a *-ism when targeting groups they don't, allowing them to continue claiming *-isms are bad without having to give up discriminatory behavior against groups they don't favor.

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How are you defining "left"?

That's a complicated question, because in many ways Leftism is not a specific set of beliefs but rather a process by which people compete for social status and power by pretending to be morally superior by making use of what Larry Auster called the "liberal script." But here's a rough and ready definition for you: If you could unironically put one of those signs in your front yard which says "In this house we believe," then it is highly likely you are a Leftist. I haven't paid specific attention to your posts so I don't know if I would call you a Leftist.

Okay, but that necessarily means we don't let you shout them down either.

That's fine with me. For the most part, the positions espoused by Leftism can't really stand up to fair scrutiny. In the absence of underhanded tactics, Leftism will lose.

If you could unironically put one of those signs in your front yard which says "In this house we believe," then it is highly likely you are a Leftist. I haven't paid specific attention to your posts so I don't know if I would call you a Leftist.

I definitely would not put one of those signs in my yard. But I know who people who would and do, and while they make me cringe, they are not evil.

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Yes, I have seen that narrative. "Good was there accidentally" I guess is arguably included in option (f) but I considered it unlikely. Even taking it as a given that she was there intentionally, my point stands.

People here considered it, and I'm pretty sure that poster even did so in good faith. Of your own proposals, the video seems to at least significantly reduce the possibility of b and c.

I'm not going to say anything with confidence yet -- we don't even have confirmation this is real video! -- but there's a long distance between 'absolute 100% proof' and not 'particularly clarifying'.

It’s a bit confusing, so he is holding the phone in one hand and shoots with the other?

Regardless this completely debunks a few of the more shameful leftist lies I’ve seen.

  1. She was obviously not just lost on the way home from dropping off her kid, she was there to obstruct.
  2. There were no conflicting or confusing orders and she wasn’t scared. There was one clear order “get out of the car” before she drives off.
  3. She wasn’t panicked or scared, she seems cocky.
  4. She could clearly see the agent in fromt of her car when she drives into him.
  5. He was not deliberately using his body to block her car, just circling it.

IMO this basically exonerates him 100%

I don't see how the video clarifies why she was there. We see her wife out of the car, yelling at the officers. We don't know why. Then we see her drive away, ignoring their commands to get out of the car. She could have been there for a legitimate reason and then gotten into some kind of argument with them. We would need to see video or get eye witness testimony from before the videos started to know.

She could clearly see the agent in fromt of her car when she drives into him.

When she drove towards him (into him seems presumptuous). That was never seriously in dispute. The question is still whether she knew he was standing there when she started. The vehicle starts moving with the wheels turned towards him. That was used to argue that she intentionally drove towards him. But then the wheels quickly turn to the right. It's hard to tell how exactly that turn intersected with the ICE agent. We don't know how much contact was made.

She likely saw him as he starting walking across the vehicle, but he stops while she looking down. She may have assumed he kept walking. She also may not have actually noticed him with the first glance.

He was not deliberately using his body to block her car, just circling it.

No, I think that's conclusively disproven by the other videos. He clearly stops walking and turns and faces her right as she finishes backing up.

When she drove towards him (into him seems presumptuous).

The phone recording from the cop who shot, as well as the original footage, does suggest that she at least grazed him. With that fairly rapid acceleration when pedestrians are that close to the car, that is very dangerous driving for sure, regardless of whether she hit him hard, grazed him, or barely missed him.

The question is still whether she knew he was standing there when she started. The vehicle starts moving with the wheels turned towards him. That was used to argue that she intentionally drove towards him. But then the wheels quickly turn to the right. It's hard to tell how exactly that turn intersected with the ICE agent. We don't know how much contact was made.

She likely saw him as he starting walking across the vehicle, but he stops while she looking down. She may have assumed he kept walking. She also may not have actually noticed him with the first glance.

This is all just apologia. As a driver she is in all circumstances obligated to drive safely and not come this close to hitting people with her car, and not accelerate this fast near pedestrians. It doesn't matter if she assumed that he had moved far enough to the side, misjudged her turning circle, pressed the go pedal too hard because she was agitated, was high on drugs, etc. Once you put someone's life in danger, they are allowed to act like their life is in danger. I don't think that shooting his gun was necessarily the best way for the cop to react to it, but she chose to flee from the police in a way that endangered a cop, and from a legal point of view that seems unlikely to result in a conviction of the cop (given the perspective of the cop and the brief time for him to act).

But then the wheels quickly turn to the right.

This would have been impossible to see from the perspective of the cop in front of the car, given how close he was. He would only have been able to see the hood of the car.

He could potentially have seen the wheels pointed to the left earlier, when he was still to the side of the car, and then taken that into consideration when he saw the car moving towards him, but whether that is actually true requires knowledge of what the cop was thinking.

The phone recording from the cop who shot, as well as the original footage, does suggest that she at least grazed him.

It doesn't. The point where he made contact with the vehicle is not on camera. You hear something. We already knew that the hand holding the phone likely made contact with the car. Eye witnesses report him leaning over the hood with his outstretched arms. The phone recording tells you nothing about what happened to the rest of his body at that point.

With that fairly rapid acceleration when pedestrians are that close to the car, that is very dangerous driving for sure, regardless of whether she hit him hard, grazed him, or barely missed him.

Dangerous, yes. But there is a massive gulf between driving dangerously and needing to be killed.

As a driver she is in all circumstances obligated to drive safely and not come this close to hitting people with her car, and not accelerate this fast near pedestrians.

That's not in dispute. What matters is whether the shooter was reasonable in his belief that he was subject to imminent severe bodily harm. She can drive dangerously and still not provide him with a justification for killing her.

It doesn't matter if she assumed that he had moved far enough to the side, misjudged her turning circle, pressed the go pedal too hard because she was agitated, was high on drugs, etc. Once you put someone's life in danger, they are allowed to act like their life is in danger.

It does matter because her state of mind should have informed his beliefs of the risks. If you see someone make eye contact with you and accelerate towards you, you are reasonable in believing he is trying to hit you. If you see that he doesn't see you, you are not. You can act like your life is in danger, but you cannot assume that the person is trying to hit you in order to justify killing them.

He could see that she could see where he was after she started driving forward. His assessment of the risk had to take her likely state of mind into account. If he knew that she knew he was there and still started driving in his direction, that would increase the likelihood that she was trying to hit him. If he knew that she had not known where he was when she started driving, then he could not rule out the most likely possibility that she started in his direction because she didn't know he was there.

This would have been impossible to see from the perspective of the cop in front of the car, given how close he was. He would only have been able to see the hood of the car.

I'm not convinced of that. Normally, when you're standing in front of a car, you can see its wheels, at least if you're standing far enough away, which I think he was.

He could potentially have seen the wheels pointed to the left earlier, when he was still to the side of the car, and then taken that into consideration when he saw the car moving towards him, but whether that is actually true requires knowledge of what the cop was thinking.

It is actually relevant what he should have been thinking.

You said it. It pays to hold off on strong comments when you know damn well that more reliable evidence is coming down the pike.

I can still believe she might have thought she was about to get black bagged and disappeared because of all the rhetoric about these guys, but we're clearly not dealing with a passive bystander.

All that taunting and indignant commentary shows she was revelling in being a main character in the drama for a minute or two (no, that doesn't justify shooting her).

Really unclear what her goal would have been in the moment, she didn't even let the spouse get back in the car, was she going to leave her behind???

EDIT: WAIT WAIT THE other lady is literally shouting "Drive baby, drive drive!" what the hell.

Anyway, at least I know who to feel bad for in this scenario: the poor stressed out dog in the backseat.

IMO this basically exonerates him 100%

My initial opinion on legality doesn't change, I did believe he was justified in the shooting even if it was ill-advised... but this would probably be enough for a Judge to toss any criminal case.

From the other videos we can see was filming with a phone using his left hand, he pulls the gun out from the right side of his body with his right hand.

?? I'm really confused right now because the agent did not go down in any of the original videos. So something must be AI or at least doctored.

He doesn't go down in this video either.

This post is so riddled with errors (it's obviously not a bodycam and he doesn't go down) that I think it might be a troll and it's probably a bad idea to engage.

Come on, it’s obviously not a troll and he’s linking a video that’s extremely relevant to our discussion. In the rush to post he got one detail wrong, stop the retarded paranoia.

In the rush to post

That is exactly the problem, writ large.

stop the retarded paranoia

Don't do this.

I’m not sure. This angle that was going around yesterday is pretty ambiguous (forgive the editorializing in the tweet this was the first one I could find):

https://x.com/nicksolheim/status/2009658214577831994?s=46

The officer seems to receive some kind of blow, his head and body flail around for half a second, then the car intervenes between his body and the camera. It’s very grainy and hard to make out.

That video appears to be sped up a bit.

Nah, he doesn't 'go down,' clearly stumbled heavily then re-orients.

This also raises in my mind the possibility that the first shot was an ACCIDENTAL trigger pull.

Agreed he didn't go down. I thought it was a bodycam footage as shakes claimed.

I doubt it was accidental though. The first shot was the best defensible shot whereas the others were through the open driver side window as the car was going by. If he didn't mean to fire the first one, I don't see why he would follow through with the rest. Also "I accidentally fired the first shot and then my training took over so I fired the rest" makes him look real bad.

I'm just raising the possibility.

And assuming it was the first shot that actually killed her, from a murder investigation perspective, the intentionality behind the killing shot is the only one that truly matters.

Anyway, firing off three shots reflexively is not that odd, its very possible its trained specifically that way.

Training to fire one shot and then stop would be very bad habit.

(I was out on the range this weekend actually, and the topic came up whether 3 vs. 4 shots per opponent is the better policy.)

I think what you say is very reasonable.

I just know if I'm on the jury and the victim has 3 bullet holes from a semi-automatic weapon and the defendant claims it was accidental discharge, I would not find that super credible.

And if I were the Defendant's attorney I wouldn't want you on my jury panel (nothing personal, of course, lol).

If you care about such things, here's a video I watched recently about self defense law in the context of shootings (based on Florida law) for my continuing legal education credits.

Tons of different circumstances came into it. Both the alleged victim and the Defendant were intoxicated, there was a group of guys against the Defendant, Defendant had bad eyesight, his glassed got knocked off, he was not legally allowed to be carrying a gun into the bar he entered...

Aaaand the decedent had a couple holes in his back. And there was a community outrage against the Defendant, complete with vigils/protests. Bunch of witnesses painted a very negative picture for the guy that was later disproven with video footage.

The Defense in that case go to the trouble of syncing up multiple video angles with sound, annotating it, recreating the scene digitally, and pulling in literal neurological experts to explain reaction times and panic reactions. Hundreds of thousands of dollars expended to give the jury a 'complete' understanding of the situation.

Except it never made it to a Jury because the Judge ruled it was justified and thus granted immunity for the homicide charges. Not the gun charges, incidentally.

So if I did my job right, the case wouldn't even make it to you, the juror.

He doesn’t appear to go down, just the hand holding his phone gets knocked down. This is clearly his phone footage, not bodycam (reflection shows him holding a phone)

That explains things. Shakes said bodycam + goes down and I thought that was very contradictory to what was shown in prior videos.

Though watching the original videos again, I don't think his phone got knocked down. It was already lowered when he finished drawing his weapon.

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