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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!
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
... Jews?
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.
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").
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