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Notes -
That was a big wall of text. But, the main thing I'm responding to is this:
No. It was so obviously not a murder. And that is why Noem and Vance are right to do what they're doing and not do the normal professional thing. The normal professional thing is for the administration to refuse to comment and insist on letting the process take place. Then, in a few months, when the officer is acquitted, you get ANOTHER round of protests and more bad press as to how murders are being excused. An environment where people refuse to see the reality in front of them and insist on substituting their own headcanon is not one where an impartial process can help. Nobody's going to believe there is such a process, and nobody will believe the outcome of such a process. If the process were to happen in state courts and is investigated by state investigators, the cop gets railroaded. If it happens in Federal courts, he gets exonerated (rightly or wrongly). The possibility of one side merely making a mistake is utterly absent. The possibility of correcting the mistake, then, is also absent; this is all conflict.
Certainly, however, this explains why so many wanting to condemn the officer insist he was not hit by the SUV. He was, in fact, hit by the SUV, and that ruins so many useful claims, such as that she could not have been attempting to run him over, or that he could not have been in reasonable fear that he would be run over.
Yeah, something's wrong here. Something's wrong with the idea that a mother of three thinks she can obstruct a police operation and then when they go to arrest her for it, flee in a way that at the very least demonstrates reckless disregard towards the life of the police officer she hit, and nothing at all will happen to her. She was wrong. And something's wrong with the fact that so many people think she should have been right.
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