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The big difference between them is that the bullet that hit Babbitt was extremely effective. People were trying to break down the doors, one of them got shot, they stopped and lost all steam.
The iceman shooter could've been in the fight mode due to his previous car-related experience, but what are the situations in which shooting the driver is the action that fixes everything? Again, I'm not asking if his action was legally justified (I am leaning towards "yes" as in "yes, he's going to be acquitted"), but if it was the correct one.
Let's imagine there was no question whether he could dodge the car or not, that he was right in front of the grille. What would shooting Good have improved in this situation? It wouldn't have stopped the car, it wouldn't have saved him, it wouldn't have allowed her to escape justice. It could only prevent Good from going full Carmageddon on the rest of the team, which is not what she was trying to do.
Which is an assumption as to intention on your part. We don't know what she would have done, which is the problem. Even if she didn't intend to run down other ICE agents, she could well have done so as part of her efforts to flee the scene. This happens in such situations; the Charlottesville guy hit people when trying to get away (after deliberately driving into the crowd), it's what contributed to the murders of two British Army corporals after they drove into an IRA funeral:
The ICE guy was not a mind reader. "Well she's trying to knock me down, but that's not intentional, that's panic, and if I get out of the way she'll just drive off and not go after anyone else" was not something he could know for sure, especially given that she was demonstrably there using her car to block ICE and to get in the way (see @Blueberry's post above).
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The best action would probably jumping on the hood, or getting the center of gravity high enough the car knocks you over instead of under. This is such a split second decision though. Shooting has high variance, maybe it only provides revenge.
It's a Honda Pilot, not a Chevy Corvette. The hood is very high.
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It could have minimized the time a friend of his would get dragged, if he got stuck the same way he did in the other incident.
I can agree that with perfect hindsight he shouldn't have shot her, but that argument strikes as kinda insane. How was he supposed to have perfect hindsight in the moment it was happening?
He wasn't, but the point of discussing whether what he did was optimal in hindsight is, IMO, to come up with a consensus that can be drilled into other LEOs so that they act more optimally if they ever find themselves in an analogous situation in the future. This is a high-profile case; whether the consensus emerges as "it was a good idea to shoot Good" or "in an idea world he should have jumped out of the way/whatever" can be expected to have some influence on cops' gut reactions when they find themselves in similar predicaments.
There is no such thing as “optimal”. It comes down to whether you think obstructing ICE is good.
I am pro-shooting because it reduces obstruction and reduces future crime.
You might be right, but this is a massive assumption.
There's a world where she becomes a martyr and people rally around her image to protest ICE even harder in response.
I'm not sure what world we're in, but the outcomes of such things is not that easy to guess off rip.
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Well, no. By "analogous situations in the future" I meant things of the shape "armed LEO thinks that a hitherto-non-murderous civilian is suddenly about to ram them with a car", whatever the identity and motivation of the civilian (and indeed, whichever law-enforcement unit the officer belongs to).
Also, with respect, you reasoning seems like a textbook example of terrorism in the original French Reign of Terror sense. "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the state was justified in killing this particularly citizen; so long as the killing frightens other civilians away from non-lethally obstructing state action in the future, then it was justified" is a very dark road.
I prefer my dark road to anarchy. Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything. A hecklers veto.
And we are struggling with this in a lot of places. Shooting one blue haired lesbian now lets ICE do their job. Honestly probably saves a billion in lost ICE man-power hours. It’s just a good trade.
This is a very silly false dichotomy: you are assuming the conclusion that "kill Mrs Good, possibly unjustly" is the only way to curb the problem of excessive obstructive protesting, creating a binary choice between human sacrifice and anarchy run amok. In fact, I don't believe that killings intended to create mass terror are the only way to curb obstructionism, if that is what you want to do - let alone that it is the most effective one. That's the whole crux of the debate, and you just whizz past it.
What are my other options?
Killing a few obstructors feels like it will solve the obstruction problem to me. Honestly there is a meme going around now where a “solves the problem button exists” and then everyone says these reasons I don’t care about will be a problem for not pressing it. I think I can just press this button.
Yes, well, ask Robespierre how that went. He might find it difficult to answer without his head, but you could ask. Ruling through fear - through actual fear, as opposed to reliable justice where punishment is meted out to the guilty in a predictable and orderly way - has not historically produced stable, long-term outcomes. If you make your government out to be made up of loose cannons who just might go nuts and kill you for sneezing at them, so watch it… you will only succeed in incentivizing the population to stay out of your way in the short term while plotting their very best to remove you ASAP.
If you want to solve the obstruction problem, you can actually arrest and prosecute people for obstruction, en masse, in an orderly, lawful, consistent way. A government which gives in to the temptation to murder random dissidents pour encourager les autres loses its mandate in a way that one which simply prosecutes crimes that are actually on the books in a scrupulous way does not.
(Of course, all of this is without getting into the thing where killing random people to create a state of terror, you know, falls petty squarely within what 99% of human beings would consider evil. I don't feel like getting into that would be a useful direction for this conversation, but it bears repeating.)
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I'm talking about perfect foresight, something that should be drilled into leos in the police academy. "Don't stand in front of the car, because there's literally nothing you can do if the driver floors it unless you have been a D1 track and field athlete. You might spend your last moments shooting the driver and you might even hit'em, but good luck explaining to Saint Peter why you shot a seventy-year-old lady with mild dementia. Yes, there are situations when spending the last moments of your life shooting at the perp trying to get away is the best course of action, but don't be a fucking dumbass cowboy and put yourself into them."
Ms. Good might have listened to her wife and floored it because her wife told her to in this particular case. In another universe she might've wanted to put the car in park to get out of the car and pressed the wrong pedal. In a third universe she was pulled out of the car when the car was in gear and she was the one holding the brake pedal. In a fourth one she was actually Basma Faheem, a recent convert to radical Islam trying to lure a federal officer into a false state of complacency and run him over.
That's still pefect hindsight. The only reason you're acting like you know what should have been drilled into their heads is because you've seen the video and can analyze all the little things that could have been done to avoid this specific situation. It's not clear if your recommendations would run into other issues during standard police work, so I find it a bit silly to declare with so much certainty how this should be handled.
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