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The Truth Social comment from Trump is terrible. Kristy Noem's statement, even if not totally accurate under opposition's scrutiny, seems pretty standard and defensible for a 2020s politician. JD Vance's statement on what actually happened is not true. Many things Vance said before and after that statement are true, but his claim that she tried to "ram this guy with her car" is not how I saw it.
What's happening right now is that ICE is losing to the dilemma action strategy that the left are experts at. It only takes one Renee Good incident to plummet public support and there are literally thousands of agitators behaving as bad, or worse than Renee Good everyday and many have been trained to behave this way by leftwing agitator groups.
It's a pretty brilliant tactic. Especially when you have a liberal society waiting to watch and react to one of the handful of incidents where an ICE agent eventually loses their patience and roughs up an agitator, or when an agent shoots one of the agitators because they felt danger in the moment. Youtubers can look at these videos after the fact and can say there was no danger or justification and they can call the agents murderers and fascists until the end of time, all while they cry about it.
I can go to my city's local ICE protest right now and say the most vile and antagonistic things imaginable (so long as its not a "threat") to these agents, and I can obstruct their movements and their ability to communicate with each other in all sorts of legally ambiguous ways, and I win no matter what. You either let me disrupt your duty, or you arrest me and I'll have millions of crowd funded dollars and attorneys ready and waiting. If you arrest me with force, Democrat politicians and left wing outlets will amplify it to a national incident and you're even more fucked. Pick your poison, Mr. ICE agent.
Not only is there is zero legal punishment for being an insufferable, society destroying cunt of a human, there is an incentive structure and tribal reward if you behave this way towards certain groups.
Honestly I agree. At least mostly - there's a reason legal standards are slightly different than moral standards. Part of what bothers me about the Good case particularly is that there's nothing stopping a delayed legal punishment. They have cell phone video, several officers' testimony, license plates, the wife even acknowledges they might talk again later, why not mail in a misdemeanor charge? Most protestors, traditionally, are willing to eat that, so it's some form of fair all around. I think felonies need to be treated with a little more care due to how they work and affect people, but protestors are regularly charged with felonies for assault during protests, are they not? Maybe I'm ignorant, but it seems to me that this idea that protestors are all getting away with horrible things feels like a false narrative.
What is seems quite true however is that the law enforcement apparatus appears incapable of self-regulation. Just like you said, zero-punishment paradigms are inherently dangerous, and I feel like ICE internally has no real brakes. They aren't regularly telling people to tone it down, demoting people who make mistakes, nope, it's all rah-rah us v. them.
The part where she hit the officer with her SUV.
Edit: To clarify, it is reasonable for ICE to arrest her for being an obstacle to them carrying out their primary mission in the area. (And I'm not being cute with "being an obstacle" - she was literally using her vehicle as an obstacle). As part of that arrest, it is reasonable for them to demand that she get out of her vehicle. Her choice was to attempt to flee the situation, which still wasn't the reason she got shot. She got shot because part of her fleeing meant that she drove into an ICE agent, who now has reasonable cause to fear that she attempted to end his life.
The fact that fleeing meant driving into an ICE agent was under control of the ICE agent. This fact should, under a reasonable set of rules of engagement, negate or at least seriously make harder whether the agent can claim fear for his life, even if he did.
Why? Under that logic, any arrest can negate fear for their life. An arrest is placing themselves into a situation with people who have not been following the law, who may decide to react violently to losing their freedom. If we followed your statement, then any arrestee has carte blanche to behave as violently as they want, as the arresting officer placed themselves into danger, so is not permitted to defend themselves.
I also think that your rules would make Good forfeit her right to behave in panic, if we followed them through. She chose to put herself in a situation that was deliberately antagonizing ICE, which (by your logic) means that it should negate or at least seriously make harder whether [Good] can claim fear for [her] life.
The difference is that in that case the officer would be shooting people who are intentionally violent, not nonviolent people who looked violent because the officer set up the situation in a way that made it hard to tell. It would be as if the officer arrested someone, handcuffed a knife to his hand, and then shot the suspect when he tried to flee because of fear that the suspect would use the knife on him.
(Obviously there is a sliding scale of such things. An arrest causes some increase in nonviolent reactions that appear violent and standing in front of a car causes some increase in actual violence. But I'd say that standing in front of the car is much farther along the scale.)
The police arrests people for non-violent offenses all the time, you still don't get to floor it to get away from them, and flooring your car at them is violent in itself.
The police are not permitted to shoot you if you floor your car to get away. Even though you "don't get to" do it, the procedure the police must follow in that situation is different. They should not be permitted to blur the difference between that and a situation where they do get to shoot you, and then shoot you because they can't tell the difference.
Yes they are, if you floor it at them. We've been sharing this video that shows what happens when they're not fast enough. Another poster mentioned they were watching police cam videos in thr wake of BLM and seen plenty of cases of policemen shooting cars driving at them, all of which were ruled justified.
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