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Notes -
Apologies if someone has brought this up already, but new video of Pretty is out from days before he died.
https://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-videos-immigration-809506eb23f44a3e8f6e53b9fda7b700
He appears to be caught on video at least one other time engaging violently with the police while armed (for some definitions of violent) and is alleged by some sources to have been spitting at the cops.
This generates two thoughts for me:
Don't do crimes. Hell, don't be a career criminal doing multiple crimes. Don't engage in unethical and illegal protests. Don't attack the police, however well intentioned. Rarely - don't date people who commit serious and violent crimes.
I can think of a very small number of cases where this sort of thing didn't turn out to be true and while those are tragedies we have a large population with a large criminal underclass, if our ratio is a hundred million to one then we are doing okay.
These are simple rules - don't be a criminal asshole, even if you are convinced of your own virtue unless you can accept the consequences. And perhaps we shouldn't burn down our society for anti-social criminals.
As corollaries-
I am now essentially convinced you can dismiss most defenses of these individuals reflexively. This is probably not good intellectual hygiene but every single time (every one!) you see a lot of lies put forth without evidence that don't make sense and often contradict available information. People later acknowledge the error or follow-up. People still don't know the undisputed facts about Rittenhouse, or the issues with the Arbery narrative (as seen in this weeks thread).
Additionally I don't know how many of us here actually regularly interact with American black people but it's a core feature of my job and I have some in my extended family. They (and their woke allies) are absolutely convinced they are liable to be killed for no reason at all at any time by police. This includes the guy from the ghetto, this includes the well behaved upper class by birth Harvard educated chair of surgery who walks to and from work in a suit more expensive than most cars.
The beliefs many people have are just completely untethered from reality and unchallenged. If knowledge is a justified true belief then these people know nothing.
My social network is unsurprisingly riddled with healthcare professionals, as Pretti was. To fully describe what I see in most of them in full would likely get labeled as a straw man, so I won't, but most of the accusations seem to be trivially true for me - they think Trump is literally Hitler and that ICE is the Gestapo, they are seeking violence and finds it justified and at the same time don't seem to think what they are doing constitutes violence.
Perhaps most importantly - everyone seems to have big opinions and feelings about politics but at the same time has no quality information, consumed no quality analysis and doesn't know agreed upon facts, much less the ones that aren't agree upon. Nothing has ever been engaged with critically, analyzed, discussed, pushed back on.
This includes the highly intelligent and educated and the guy who pushes the food carts.
Feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory. Informed opinions are absent.
In truth I am not sure why I wrote this, some if it is surely cover to point out that Pretti appears to be an idiot. Some of it is processing my feelings. I don't think much of what I'm saying is novel, but I can tell those who don't have the experience that as someone working in an environment with a lot of minorities and a lot of institutionalized wokeness...well people have been lobotomized.
Perhaps I'm hoping someone will say something that gives me hope, but even here our left leaning posters mostly seem to be blind soldiers for the cause.
I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here. That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him? That it is a good thing that he died? That the circumstance that he was killed should not make people update in the direction of a negative opinion of ICE, their mission, or the way they are implementing it? These are all different assertions, and a post that only amounts to a nebulous "boo Pretti, and boo all of the people who say yay Pretti too" does not do a particularly good job of defending any single one of them unless all you are doing is playing the Ethnic Tension game.
However antisocial or stupid he was seems irrelevant to the immediate charge which got so many people (including, seemingly, ones who are otherwise sympathetic to ICE and police shootings) riled up about the case, which is that his killing was unambiguously unnecessary for the safety of the ICE officers who did it. Whether this charge is actually true can be debated separately, with no reference to Pretti's character or past actions. If it is in fact false, his character doesn't matter anyway because you have as much of a right to self-defense against Mother Theresa as you have against Hitler. If it is true, I wish you would be more explicit about the actual contours of any right to performing summary executions you want to grant ICE if the target is a sufficiently bad person.
Pretti should not have been shot. He was disarmed and not a serious threat at that moment. Unfortunately, it was a highly chaotic situation with protesters doing their best to cause stress and confusion. Pretti was disarmed just a moment before he was shot, and it is unlikely the other officers present knew he had been disarmed. It's quite possible one of the officers called out something like "I've got his gun", but in all the chaos another heard "he's got a gun!"
It was not an execution. It was a panicked split-second decision that proved fatally mistaken. Shooting him multiple times in quick succession is actually evidence of this, since your goal is to quickly and decisively end the threat. You don't shoot once and then wait to see if he can still shoot back before resuming fire, because that's just a good way of getting more people killed. Executions are more deliberate and conservative with ammo.
The video evidence of prior days indicates that Pretti was repeatedly inserting himself into dangerous situations with police while armed. He was indisputably obstructing, not just exercising his first amendment rights. He was intentionally creating circumstances that would give officers a legitimate fear for their life and heighten the chances of one of those officers making a fatal mistake. If you keep playing Russian roulette, you will eventually end up with a bullet in the head.
While the new videos don't change the narrow question of whether the officer should have shot at that moment, it does a lot to change the whole narrative around the shooting and how much blame should be apportioned to the victim himself
By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.
This is just an attempt to spin a narrative to defend the in-group. Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution and does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.
It was an accident, in all likelihood the claim from everyone will turn into "we thought he still had a gun."
That's accidental mutual combat, self-defense, a tragedy, whatever - not an execution or assassination as we see the media try.
I'm not sure how shooting a disarmed person in the back who is being restrained will ever be seen as "self-defense". A Tragedy, absolutely. An accident, sure I can grant that. But accidents that lead to death is manslaughter and the ICE agent should be tried for that. Mutual combat is far fetched.
I wrote about similar situations in one of my recent posts.
If you haven't been in a scuffle like this it is hard to convey.
Even if you do something (like disarm the guy), it takes awhile for everyone to be aware of that, even in a controlled environment. In a messy situation like this? Fuck no.
It looks bad, but if you had omniscient level understanding of everyone's moment to moment information and thought process you'd likely see that the thinking here was not the problem.
These things just aren't like the movies or how people think they are, which is one of the reasons why after the Good situation a lot of were like "no, stop doing this, no training and skill is enough, keep doing things like this and more unavoidable bad outcomes will happen. When not if."
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He was in the process of being restrained, but he was not actually restrained. If he had a gun, which he did for the majority of the altercation, then he could have drawn it.
If you didn't know he had been disarmed and you had mistaken reason to believe he was/had drawing/drawn a weapon, then yes you can shoot in self-defense. Shooting him in the back is irrelevant, because once you decide he is an imminent threat, you don't wait for him to turnaround and get the first shot. You shoot and you keep shooting to decisively eliminate the threat. Self-defense has to do with the perceived threat. You are in no real danger if someone draws a replica gun on you and threatens to shoot, but you can still act in self-defense if you don't know that it's a replica. The question is how reasonable was the perception of threat, and that is unfortunately a kind of squishy concept where law enforcement is usually given the benefit of the doubt.
For me, the Pretti shooting is an edge-case, even moreso than the Good shooting. I think the officer who shot first needs to be reprimanded in some fashion, but exactly how depends on details that cannot be gleaned from the videos. Firstly, it has to do with how much danger the officer thought he was in at that moment, not whether his evaluation of the danger was correct. Secondly, presuming his evaluation of the danger was incorrect, does that error rise to the level of criminal negligence? These questions are not easily answered by watching the videos.
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This is not in fact how the word 'execution' is used in any other context. Your definition would include killing in justified self defense too. If a man kills a home invader rushing at him with a knife, do you think his defense attorney would call that killing an 'execution?' If you look up how many Germans were executed by the allies during and after WW2, you will get a number in the thousands, not the millions; the allies -- allied soldiers tasked with violence on behalf of the state -- killed millions of German soldiers in the war, but absolutely no one calls those deaths 'executions.'
'Execution' implies deliberation and, most critically, control over the situation. Killing in the course of an altercation can be (and is in this instance, I think!) manslaughter or murder, but it is never an execution. If your definition of 'execution' is co-extensive with 'killing,' why insist on the former? Is it because 'execution' sounds worse because no one else uses your definition?
(ETA: After considering it a little more, I think 'execution' particularly requires that you kill because you believe the victim deserves to die (as a necessary but not sufficient condition). Killing out of confusion or fear of someone's current behavior can't qualify. 'Extrajudicial summary execution' refers to cases like occupying soldiers hanging or shooting civilians on suspicion of sabotage, not those same soldiers firing into a crowd of rioting partisans.)
This sounds good, sure. Have you actually considered the implications? US (non-ICE) police have acted incompetently in high stress split second situations before -- I expect you're familiar with at least a few examples -- so should we abolish the police? US soldiers have absolutely made mistakes like this before; do we need to disband the military? Unfortunately, while 'no lethal mistakes, ever' is a laudable standard, it's one that no group tasked with exercising the state's monopoly on violence has ever met or ever will.
I certainly agree Pretti's shooter, specifically, shouldn't have a gun or the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence, and in fact should be tried for homicide. The shooting is cause to update in the direction of ICE being incompetent thugs... but update how much?
Out of 50,000(? Organizers claim, anyway) protestors in Minneapolis, ICE has only actually killed two of them. I happen to think that Good's shooter would have been easily acquitted had it gone to trial, but allow that that was murder too: is the failure rate per violent encounter here actually worse than average? I'm not sure, but you haven't even tried to make the argument that it is.
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Define it.
Define "competently"
I need your full rubric, please.
Otherwise, this is just a weasel way of saying "ICE agents should only every make perfection decisions in all circumstances"
If I give you a rubric what's to stop you from rule-lawyering it as a bad faith actor? Written laws cannot fight back as they have no agency. I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it. This is not restricted to ICE. FBI, ATF, Fed, DEA, DoE, anyone with the power of violence. Do you think the ATF were competent at waco/ruby ridge? Do you think the LEs were competent here: Daniel Shaver?
I'm willing to give you an effort post in what does a competent government agent look like, if you'll return the favor/effort and give me examples of government LE agents behaving incompetently in the past decade? People on the right here love to complain about the lefties acting incompetent in the gov Bureaucracy, shouldn't be hard.
By that rubric, if I yell "I'm going to shoot you!" and point something that is an exact facsimile of a gun at a police officer but isn't, and they shoot me, that is incompetent on their part, even though it would require psychic powers on their behalf to know the difference.
I think the problem here is that you seem to very much want to remove any subjectivity from the rubric, but this is just logically impossible without leading to absurd outcomes like the above. Subjectivity requires us to examine things like, even if there was no gun, did they believe there was? If so, why? Was that belief reasonable even if incorrect? If not, just how unreasonable was it? In this case, it hinges on factors like what the person may have said, how they may have acted, whether or not an accidental discharge took place, etc. These factors would determine whether criminal charges are appropriate, if so which ones, and whether and which workplace disciplinary actions would be appropriate.
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What about law enforcement shooting someone who is not pointing a gun and who they are not even attempting to restrain?
I believe you are the big advocate for rules having no agency around here. Are you going to apply that same argument to your own arguments?
Mu.
Human rules cannot constrain human will. This does not mean that rules are useless. It does mean that they are not a general solution to the problem of human evil. You appear to be doing an absolutely fantastic job of demonstrating this reality with your arguments, so my congratulations on that. I will certainly be quoting your arguments in the future.
Logic is not a human rule. If you are appealing to it, you must be bound by it. I believe I am doing a fairly good job of being bound by logic.
If the above is not a satisfactory answer, I invite you to elaborate.
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Of course it does. "Execution" isn't a word that includes legitimate or illegitimate attempts at self-defense, involuntary manslaughter, or even anything covered by the felony murder rule. The etymology is a contraction from "execution of death" (i.e. a death sentence) which uses the general/original meaning of execution, "the carrying out (of a plan, etc.)".
If a killing was pre-planned, it might be described as an execution. If a killing happened unplanned because the killer was on a hair-trigger and "Someone said gun!" then, even if it was criminal, it wasn't an execution.
This has changed my view, it being an "execution" would have required some premeditation on the executors part. However do you grant that this has the optics of an execution? Where 5 agents dogpile a guy to restrain him and another draw and shoots him from behind while he is kneeling and being restrained (who wouldn't resist their "execution")
I suppose? It's more like the optics of a street gang fight to me, honestly. A bunch of people on both sides who like to talk shit and throw hands, ready to smash things or deliver a beat-down to someone who they think earned it, none of them with any kind of faith that a judge might be able to deliver justice instead, going armed but still swinging and shoving and stepping up like they can't risk their pride or can't imagine the guns might add any weight to those choices, and then some point a gun flashes and someone's panicked and suddenly there's screaming and flying bullets.
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This strikes me as an opinion that is completely unaware of the standards and realities of policing, or more likely, is trying to obfuscate those realities and hold ICE agents to an entirely different standard. I don't think, to extend an olive branch, that this was a "good shoot". However, these things, as you can see if you watch any amount of body cam footage, do not fall in simple boxes of "good" or "bad". Those split second decisions that you seemingly think ICE agents are not up to the standard of are ones that cops are exposed to - and often call poorly - every day. Most of the time, if cops could have reasonably believed, in that moment, that the suspect had a gun, or was reaching for one, they are cleared, even if it turns out they made the wrong call.
If your opinion is that the level of organization of the ICE agents was overall poor, and there were things they could have done to reduce the amount of confusion (or even avoid the shooting all together); then great! I agree. If your opinion is that American policing is on the whole too protective of officers; that's an opinion I do not share, because I think it would bind police's hands in a lot of cases and get cops and innocent bystanders killed; but I think it's at least a consistent opinion to have. But the media circus and your adherence to it as an ICE-specific problem makes me think that's not your opinion. As I said, at best you are simply unaware of what is required of cops and what standards are applied to them after the fact. At worst, you're disregarding it to frame this as some kind of wild outlier because of the relevance to the culture war fight of the week.
I'm inclined to think it's the latter, right down to your framing. Your classification of it as an "extrajudicial summary execution" is both legally and morally weak.
Legally, the choice to call it an execution implies the intent was killing, even though in every American context (be it law enforcement or personal self-defense) it is a choice to use lethal force to stop a threat. Yes, that (often) leads to death, but it's not the intent! That's explicitly why the agents could actually be in legal danger here, as if they can't prove they thought he was a threat they were not allowed to use lethal force to stop him. Then the choice to call it "extrajudicial" implies that they are exercising some power that is illegitimate or otherwise not vested to them, which is just false.
Morally, it's weak because the word "execution" is an exceptionally loaded term, and you're doubling it up with "extrajudicial". It's an attempt to paint ICE agents as some kind of unprecedented perversion or conduction of law enforcement, when that explicitly is not so. So unless you're trying to sovcit chadyes at me and tell me that every form of police killing is an "extrajudicial summary execution" and that the cops should not have that ability, you're just talking up a very mundane (in the scheme of things) shitty police shoot as some sort of unique thing, and it's just not.
For what it's worth, if this shooting sparked some huge discussion about how American policing is conducted, I'd find it somewhat tiresome but at least internally consistent. There are things I don't like about the "rules of engagement" for law enforcement (Despite the bad implementations in cities like Chicago, there are certain crimes/potential criminals that can simply be dealt with after the fact, when they're less aware of police presence and more likely to be caught by surprise/when they're not amped up), but this was never the discussion. It's just another piece of manipulated evidence to hammer home how fascism is very obviously around the corner.
I have never claimed this and don't agree its an ICE-specific problem. It's problem across LE agencies and executors of the Governments Monopoly on Violence (GMoV).
I am more here. Police are given enormous power, prestige, respect and authority. And that level of authority needs to come with consequences when you fuck up big time. "Great power = Great responsibility". When a police officer fucks up, us citizens pay the bill, both in loss of rights, and loss of money as the government needs to settle with our taxes.
Nobody is forcing these people to become police officers, if they lack the temperament, or ability to react in a competent manner in split second decision making, even after training then they should either be confined to a desk or fired. I'm remined of the previous discussion on the Uvalde Police officers and how the neighboring police actually responded competently vs the local ones who just cowered and beat up parents.
I ignored the bottom half your post because I think you are tilting at windmills that aren't my position. I changed my opinion that "it is literally an execution" to it has "The optics of an execution", It's manslaughter, and if I was on a jury I'd convict on that charge. As I've said elsewhere this site is really my only media use, so charges of believing some MM propaganda are super hollow. I am able to develop an opinion via my own thoughts and senses even if you don't agree with the conclusion.
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OP describes why it is not an execution by highlighting the difference between an execution and an accident. You claim it is a summary execution by describing what makes an execution "summary". You did not respond to OPs points at all, and this rhetorical tactic of ignoring what OP said makes you look weak.
You may very well be correct, but you are not arguing correctly.
My opinion has been changed. It is not premeditated enough to be an execution. It is manslaughter and gross negligence on account of the shooter. It's not an accident because the shooter did not "accidentally" unholster, point, and pull the trigger. He did all of those things very deliberately. His failure of situational awareness resulted in death.
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In other words, not an execution in the way any ordinary person uses that term.
Then the state should not have a monopoly on violence. There is really no good evidence that ICE or CPB are particularly incompetent compared to other law enforcement agencies, because they are almost unique in being subjected to a very well organized protest and obstruction operation with the tacit (or perhaps even explicit) support of local authorities. Normally, they lean on local law enforcement for help in these kind of situations, but that help has been denied until recently. No matter how well-trained people are, there will always be mistakes, and the number of mistakes will increase in proportion to the number of risky and dangerous situations. This is an isolated demand for competence.
If we applied this logic to the Babbitt shooting, then we should also be disarming and standing down the U.S. Capitol Police. Babbitt was unarmed and, though acting aggressively and belligerently, she was not an immediate deadly threat. She should not have been shot for much the same reason that Pretti should not have been shot. However, with all the chaos and danger of the Jan 6th riots, it was likely that someone somewhere would get shot. For that reason, I don't have much sympathy for Babbitt. Although Lt. Bryd should not have shot, she also bears a lot of responsibility for putting him in a difficult situation. We could just demand more competence from Byrd and hold him entirely responsible, but that only incentivizes more reckless behavior by people like Babbitt.
Unfortunately, I suspect that is the ulterior motive behind these argument. If you can demand infinite competence from law enforcement, if the officer is always held 100% to blame for every bad shoot, then you can exploit that to further your agenda. It creates more incentive for these "protest" groups to insert themselves into dangerous situations to get what they want, because they will never even be held even a little bit accountable should an officer make a mistake. Of course, the alternative where we hold people like Pretti 100% at fault is also unworkable, because it gives too much power to officers that can and will be abused.
If you keep talking like that I might just vote you into political office.
It is not, I demand competence from all government agents who exercise that monopoly of violence. Sword of Damocles, or "With great power comes great responsibility" take your pick. If you can't remain calm under stressful situations that you have no right being a ICE agent, Police, Law Enforcement, etc. If your negligence or incompetence leads to someone dying you should be punished for manslaughter.
Acceptable, put Lt. Byrd in a trial and determine if he was negligent in shooting when he did.
Morally yes, and Pretti bears responsibility for putting himself in these situations, As does Rittenhouse, and so on down the line. Legally no, we don't punish the woman for dressing skimpily walking through the ghetto even if common sense should dictate that is a dumb idea.
My agenda is that I think our current elites are grossly incompetent and attempting to hold them accountable for their fuck-ups, mistakes, and errors is how we get more competent elites. Apparently that is a radical idea. But I guess the tribal instinct to protect insiders from the consequences of their mistakes is too strong to have functional governments.
You're too late for this. The chance to do so, and prove you had actual principles instead of partisan instincts, was five years ago. The opportunity has passed, and so now the one side will learn from the other and protect their own.
I am only human and have only recently awakened the urge to post online. My position hasn't changed, I'm just going to shrug. As for partisan instincts, mine are squarely in the libertarian section, entirely orthogonal to this left vs right divide.
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