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On the general principle: Is your claim that anytime a LEO crosses in front of or behind a vehicle with a suspect in the driver's seat they are throwing away any legitimate interest in not being ran-over? That if the suspect decides to flee, it may be unfortunate that they had to drive over an officer to do so, but that that's fundamentally the officer's fault and not a charge the suspect should face? No one seems to want to describe themselves as believing in a right-to-flee or arrest-only-after-fair-combat but it's really hard for me to make sense of this impulse otherwise.
Let's disregard the vehicle for a moment and say cops are arresting someone in their home. They position themselves in the front, where they announce themselves, but also have an officer in the back. My understanding is that if the suspect barrels through the cop in the back door that this is both an assault the suspect will be charged with and grounds for the officer to use any reasonable force to defend himself and subdue the suspect. This remains true even though we know suspects sometimes flee and that this tactic creates a heightened risk for a violent encounter between a fleeing suspect and the police.
If the suspect is running at the cop with a shotgun, the cop has a reasonable fear for his life and has every right to shoot the suspect to end that threat. Perhaps the suspect just liked holding the shotgun casually in his home (exercising his strongly-protected second amendment rights!) or was worried that some rival gang were pretending to be police or whatever and had no desire to shoot true cops. These circumstances have no bearing on whether the officer had a reasonable belief of the threat nor the legality or morality of his subsequent actions.
I get that Garner has no force if a cop can hold a gun to his own head and say, "If you don't surrender, the shame from failure to apprehend you shall drive me to suicide, consequently I have a legitimate fear for my life and can now use deadly force." But happening to be in front of a parked car is... absolutely not like that. There are lots of legitimate investigatory and safety reasons an officer might want to be in front of the vehicle, and even more reasons to briefly cross the front or back of the vehicle to navigate from one side to another. And being around a parked vehicle is not (barring freak circumstances) dangerous until the driver takes a positive action to, at best, recklessly endanger the officer. Actions that the driver, very notably, has no right to take.
Police agencies advise officers to avoid loitering in front of vehicles because suspects sometimes take illegal, positive actions that gravely endanger the officer. These policies in no way, legally or morally, transfer responsibility of the suspect's actions to the officer or undermine his right to defend himself from violence. To say otherwise is textbook victim blaming.
In this specific case: While the general principle is very clear and backed by extensive caselaw, the facts of this particular incident are even more damning. (A few videos for anyone who wants to check my description.)
The agent is fully clear — several feet off to the right — of the front of the SUV when Good began to flee. She puts the car into reverse with the wheel pointed left. One second into her felony fleeing, she has repositioned the car so that it is dead-on the officer. She continues to turn in reverse, until the officer is at the center-left of the front of the car. In two seconds, he went from being in a completely normal position to the side and front of the vehicle, in no particular danger from her pulling straight forward, to being directly in her strike path, as a result of her illegal actions.
Two seconds into the commissioning of this crime, she kicks the car into drive with wheels turned still slightly left and then straight forward, directly at the officer, appears to gun the accelerator but thankfully loses traction.
The tires, for about half a second, slip in place. The vehicle is pointed directly at Ross. Without the ice on the road, it seems far more likely than not to me that Good would have completely ran him over at this moment. She continues to turn the wheels to the right, though Ross, as a result of Good's crimes, cannot see her tires at this point, only the movement of her hands on the steering wheel.
She gains traction. The vehicle begins to take off with the tires turned somewhat-but-not-at-all-fully to the right. She clips into the officer, who only after being struck with the left front of her SUV, four seconds after it began to move, fires through the windshield, and continues to fire as she begins to turn more fully away from Ross. It's unclear to me to what extent he was able to jump out of the way vs. being literally thrown by the force of the car smashing into him—look at his foot movement around the first shot.
The time from the car beginning to move to the last shot being fired is literally 5 seconds. There was no way for him to jump out of the path of the vehicle—the direction he would have needed to dive toward changed from the start of the encounter to when he was struck a couple of seconds later.
I simply do not believe a reasonable observer could look at these facts and conclude that he had baited her into a justification for deadly force or that his right to self defense should be in any way diminished by his actions.
Well, compare that to the situation where the police handcuffed a knife to the suspect. I think that in that case they did throw away a lot of legitimate interest in not being knifed by the suspect, and they shouldn't claim "he was a threat because he had a knife". If they are actually knifed by the suspect, you can charge the suspect, but the standard for self-defense against being attacked by the suspect should be stricter than it usually is--strict enough that police only handcuff knives to suspects when it's actually necessary, not when the main effect is giving a reason to shoot the suspect.
Of course, walking in front of a car is necessary a lot more often than handcuffing a knife to a suspect. So the standard shouldn't be as bad as it is then. Still, it should be stricter than what it would be if the officer had not walked in front of the car.
If in this specific case the car did come at him in a stronger sense than just "it looked dangerous and he's allowed to shoot if it looks dangerous", then yes, in this case I will concede. But not in the general case.
Suppose instead, they are questioning someone in their own kitchen, and the officers clearly observe a knife block within arms reach. They tell the person that they are under arrest, at which point the person grabs a knife out of the block and lunges at an officer, causing the suspect to be shot dead. Does the fact that the police could have asked the person to move to a different location before attempting to arrest them negate the self-defense, in your view? If yes, and the suspect knows that, then doesn't that give the suspect the ability to put the police in a no-win situation of either getting stabbed or getting charged with murder?
If they actually grab a knife out of the block and lunge at the officer, then even under strict standards the officer would have good reason to shoot. So the police could shoot.
If the police said "I thought I saw him go for the knife" and shot him while he might have been reaching for the knife or might have been doing nothing at all, I'd be much less inclined to trust the police. But even then, the comparison doesn't work well because there's little reason for the suspect to reach for the knife except to attack the officer, so going for the knife is probably an attack, while in the car the suspect has a pretty plausible reason to drive other than to attack ther officer.
(If he has a knife handcuffed to him, such that any movement looks like he's reaching for the knife, he does of course have a plausible reason to move other than to attack.)
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