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Classic noncentral fallacy. When you say "fleeing the police", the audience imagines an unarmed person running away, not a person trying to run over a policeman with a giant hunk of metal. Sure, fleeing the police alone should not result in deadly force, as it is not imminent danger to the policeman. "Fleeing" in form of ramming the policeman with the vehicle should elicit immediate deadly response, as it is a deadly threat. If you can not flee without threatening deadly harm to the policeman - well, you are fucked, do not flee, or try and eat the bullet. It doesn't even have to be the police - if you try to murder anybody with a vehicle, they have obvious right to self defense. The victim being the police just aggravates it, because the criminal must have known attacking the police is a crime - any sane adult does - and did it anyway.
I think it's worth noting that even if she did not intend to kill or harm the officer, at a minimum (1) she was driving recklessly; and (2) attempting to flee the authorities. I don't know what the law is in Minnesota, but I think that in most jurisdictions if you are fleeing the authorities, drive recklessly in doing so, and kill someone in the process, you are guilty of murder, or at least some kind of aggravated homicide.
From the videos, it seems implausible that the officer would have died if he had not shot her, though. It seems like the appropriate response is just to send her plates to the cops and arrest her for fleeing/reckless.
That may be, but from the officer's perspective, making a decision in about a quarter of a second, it may have reasonably seemed as though this woman posed a grave danger to him; to his fellow officers; and/or to the public at large.
I would say it depends on the officer's assessment of the level of danger she posed.
But we have the ability to assess the officer's assessment. In my view, something is going quite wrong if the officer assesses a currently unmoving car that he is standing not centered in front of as a potentially fatal threat.
Are you saying that he opened fire before the car started moving?
No, I am saying that has was positioned such that in the event the car did start moving, he could have easily moved out of the way, as indeed he did.
How "easily" is that, when he still got hit? And that was with the ice on the road making the wheels spin in place for a while.
Also, are you sure you're not moving the goalposts? You said he assessed a "currently unmoving car" as a threat, when he didn't do anything until the car started moving.
I would personally be pretty confident that I could get out of the way from the position he was in. Being able to get to the side while still holding both cell phone and gun and also not getting injured at all seems to me like it easily qualifies as "getting out of the way" even though there was some contact. My previous post probably should have been more precise in describing an "initially" unmoving car. I think it is excessively generous to frame the officer as actually being in danger, though I acknowledge that it probably qualifies as legally being in danger.
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