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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.
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.
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.
I genuinely can't tell if this is praise or a "You have a shit argument I can't wait to use them in the future to throw tomatoes at"
Rules are just the manifestation of human will, they have no sanctity on their own. Rather they must be continually believed in, and enforced. Resting on the laurels of some previously set up rules is much like resting on any laurels, it lasts for a bit but always fails later. We as a country have become complacent believing the rules of yesteryear were sacred, untouchable, enforced themselves. But that is a mistake, it takes active effort to defend the liberties our founders enshrined.
The problem with litigating rules, is that it leaves them open to abuse of the rules-as-written instead of the rules-as-intended. But rules-as-intended requires active effort to get people to agree with the understanding and to police bad actors who desire to abused the rules-as-written for personal or tribal gain.
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