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Notes -
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!
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:
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.
Even granting for the moment that this is true, there is not, in fact, an exception in self defense for futility.
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.
Even if true, this would not defeat self defense.
There's no such law, even in Minneapolis.
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
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.
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.
https://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/supreme-court/1967/40004-1.html
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.
I don't think that's correct. I don't see where it says it's limited to the police.
The offence is not fleeing the police. The offence would be hitting him with her car.
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.
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".
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Of course it does.
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.
It says "resisting or preventing" an offense, not just preventing an offense. Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?
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).
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.
No, I don't.
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.
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.
Why not?
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.
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?
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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.
Health and safety
Reduces lost-time accidents and cuts down on paperwork.
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.
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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.
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.
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