Glassnoser
1d ago
How effective is it though? Iranians are the least religious people of any Muslim country I have ever met by far. The heavy-handedness of the government in enforcing the religious laws seems to be backfiring. Islam is on the decline, with many people converting to Zoroastrianism.
Glassnoser
1d ago
Why do protests in poorer countries like Iran result in so many deaths? The police seem to enact much cruder and less effective methods at controllling the protests. In West, we seem to be much more capable of keeping large protests under control without too much violence and death.
Is it just that the regime doesn't care as much about the deaths of protesters and thinks a brutal response is more effective at deterring further protesting? Or are they just at crowd control? Sniping people from rooftops seems very ineffective relative to groups of riot police clearing out streets block by block.
Killing people seems to like a poor choice because it undermines the legitimacy of the government. If the protesters are clearly causing more harm than the government, it gives the government the moral high ground. Being overly brutal seems like a recipe for greater backlash and foreign intervention.
Glassnoser
1d ago
How does a social safety net reduce patient violence?
Glassnoser
1d ago
If you draw a firearm in the presence of a police officer you won't have the opportunity to use it as a club against him before he fills you with holes, and no jury on the planet would convict him. It's impossible to use a gun as a club against someone without first passing through a condition in which they would have reasonable cause to believe you might shoot them with it.
You're right. It was a bad example. The point is that it is possible in principle to use what can be a deadly weapon in a way that isn't a threat of severe bodily harm. Comparison to guns are bad because guns are specifically for killing people. If someone pulls out a gun on a police officer or uses it in any way to attack him, that can reasonably be interpreted as as threat on his life.
A car is nothing like that. 99.99% of the time it is not being used a weapon.
All notions that Good's car did not pose a deadly threat are based on hindsight. The only information available to the officer at that moment was the fact that a car was accelerating toward him.
That isn't the only information available to him. He has the prior that virtually all cars are used for transportation, not killing. He has the fact that she was not exhibiting any threatening behaviour towards him. He has the fact that she was turning the car away from him and that he was clear of the car by the time he shot. He has the fact that he should have been aware that she did not know where he was going to position himself once she had stopped reversing and that the initial direction of her car was intended to facilitate her escape, not to hit him. The only piece of information that he had to support the idea that she was trying to kill him was the fact that she made a quick decisions after only seeing him there for a split second to start her drive in his direction. I don't think that's sufficient evidence on its own to support his belief. And it is especially weak considering that by the time he took his shots, she was turned away from him.
It does not matter how fast the car is moving, because you can fall under the wheel and be crushed no matter how fast or slow it's moving.
It does, because it dramatically reduces the risk. Someone walking down the sidwalk might have a bomb hidden inside his jacket. That doesn't justify killing him. The police do not have the right to eliminate all possible threats to their lives.
Okay, so, how exactly did the cop in question escalate the situation, especially unreasonably?
By standing in front of the vehicle, and by pulling out his gun.
Maybe it won't immediately stop the car, but it will prevent them from backing up and trying again.
The threat has to be imminent. You can't shoot someone because of speculation about what they might do in the future. It's far safer to wait and see what actually will happen. If there is so much uncertainty about whether that initial movement forward was an attempt on his life, then it's much wiser to wait a moment and confirm that before attempting to stop a hypothetical second attempt.
Again, with the benefit of hindsight we know she didn't intend to do that, but also again, you're not required to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight to deal with a threat you perceive in the moment.
You don't have to wait until you have the benefit of hindsight, but you do have to be conservative and only shoot when the threat rises to sufficient level and you do have to wait until the threat is immediate. You also have to take other options to get out of harms way if they are available to you.
This substack post goes over this theory in great detail, with many, many citations from case law, many of which are 9-0 or 8-1 supreme court decisions.
I'll have a read later, but that goes against everything I've read about the relevant law.
Glassnoser
1d ago
The difference is they weren't random bystanders whose intentions are unclear and who deserve the benefit of the doubt. They came there to harass and impede ICE officers, and they harassed and impeded ICE officers. ICE officers were entirely reasonable to expect escalation.
What intentions are you talking about exactly? Intention to impede ICE doesn't come close to supporting a reasonable belief that she had the intention of running him over.
There were dozens of attacks, including vehicular attacks, shootings, and others, on ICE officers.
Dozens out of how many interactions? The US has 350 million people. Extremely rare events that will never happen to you or to anyone you know happen every day. Dozens doesn't even come close to that level.
I can totally accept the idea that he might have reasonably thought there was chance she would run him over and that there was a certain level of hostility that made it more likely. But the level of risk aversion it takes to say that that rises to a sufficient level to justify killing someone is astounding to me.
That happened many times already, including to the very same agent who was attacked this time.
This indicates to me that he putting himself into situations he should not be putting himself into. To the extent this fear of being hit by a car is legitimate, it would be far better for the police to respond to it by avoiding the situations that lead to it. There are reports coming out about how poorly trained and selected these officers are and I suspect that goes a long way to explaining these incidents. Do you really think it's preferrable that ICE kills people to send the message that people should stop protesting them in the way they've been doing rather than adopt standard practices that avoid these risks entirely?
So it is not a stretch at all that somebody might try to attack the ICE officer with the vehicle, it's a fact.
What's a stretch is that this particular person in this particular situation is going to attack him and will do so in a way that poses sufficient risk to him that killing her was the appropriate response.
And it's not a stretch that this somebody may be somebody who is already actively taunting and harassing ICE agents, and went as far as receiving training how to do that. It's a very plausible conclusion.
Where are you getting the idea that she was taunting ICE agents from?
Glassnoser
1d ago
I gave you an example. Even though murder doesn't necessarily require intent to kill, attempted murder does. Otherwise, there is no "attempt". You seem to be assuming that an attempt to complete an act that would constitute murder if it resulted in death constitutes attempted murder. That's not true.
Another problem is that you assume resisting arrest with a car is attempted murder. It is not necessarily. The car would have to be used in an attempt to kill the officer. Resisting arrest by driving away is not attempted murder if there is not intent on killing the officer with the car. Even the risk that the officer might be killed is not enough on its own to turn it into attempted murder. That is true even if it would be murder had the officer been accidentally killed.
Killing someone while committing a felony is not necessarily felony murder. It depends on the felony. It's not just any felony. There is also the merger doctrine which excludes felonies where the elements would constitute the elements of murder. That would seem to apply in this case. If you're arguing that the felony is the act of hitting the cop with the car and that would be murder if the cop died, then it can't be felony murder.
The felony has to be a separate act from the one that resulted in death. For example, you commit robbery and then shoot someone. That's felony murder even if you shot them by accident. But if you don't actually shoot them, the robbery isn't attempted murder just because you could have accidentally shot someone. That would make every armed robbery felony murder.
Glassnoser
1d ago
If I visit the US as a tourist, I cannot work there, despite being there legally. The right to work is not the test. There are several visas that don't allow one to work.
The relevant point here, regardless of how you want to define words, is that the US is breaking the law by deporting people who it should not be deporting, both legally and morally. More importantly, they should not be being deported, legally or morally in the way that they are.
The reality is that ICE is disappearing people without due process and sending them to be tortured in prison in El Salvador without so much as a criminal charge, let alone a trial. It's not histrionic to describe them that way. To deny that and say they're only deporting illegal immigrants in accordance with existing law elides the fact that these people's rights are being abused in myriad ways and that they legally cannot actually be deported. The US is breaking the law.
You can come up with some argument why technically the definition of illegal immigrants means that even though they can't be deported that's the correct label to use, but the original claim was clearly trying to say that everything is on the up and up and no one was being mistreated. The alleged histrionics are much closer to the truth.
I have never seen anything approaching a reasonable defence of this.
I don't understand what you think normally prevents drivers from fleeing traffic stops. Police don't ordinarily put themselves in front of vehicles to prevent them from leaving. Are you saying that they do and that, because they are legally allowed to shoot drivers in these situations, that's how they prevent driver's from fleeing traffic stops?
The reality is that drivers absolutely can just flee a traffic stop without getting shot, which I think you probably understand, so I really don't get what you're trying to say.
Is your argument that police need the right to shoot at people driving their vehicles at them to protect themselves in such situations?
I agree with you that if for some reason police officers did have good reason to be physically blocking a car with their bodies that they'd have the right to shoot someone who tried to run them over if it would help (which it normally wouldn't), and for that reason, there is some additional deterrence for the driver to run the police officer over.
But in reality, the cop shooting the driver would not normally prevent him from being run over, and it would also be a crime for the driver to run him over (in addition to the crime of fleeing). So there is plenty of deterrent. The police do not need an infinite level of deterrence capability to protect themselves against minute risks, which seem to be regularly exaggerated.
You could have a legal system that gave police very wide latitude to use the threat of force to enforce the law, incluing deliberately placing themselves in harms way, daring suspects to do something dangerous and risk getting shot. But that's not the legal system the United States has. It puts more value on protecting criminals from themselves than from giving the police the maximum level of coercive tools. It expects police officers to avoid dangerous situations to minimize the risk of anyone, including suspects from getting hurt. The shooter went against those expectations and did something he wasn't supposed to do, and it resulted in someone's death.
Its a very perverse incentive, to say the least. "Why not add vehicular manslaughter to my array of charges in exchange for a 2% chance of escaping for a few more hours."
I don't get what you're saying here. Doesn't that quote show how the supposed incentive you're alleging doesn't exist? Why would anyone make that trade off?
That is a sufficient deterrent. You don't need to add death on top of decades in prison to the consequences of this decision. If the police think that that deterrent isn't enough, they can just not block moving vehicles with their bodies.
Glassnoser
1d ago
You really need to watch all the videos. Each video on its own can easily give one a false impression that is totally dispelled by another video. He clearly stopped and turned to face the car just as she was finishing backing up.
It's very hard to determine the relative movement of objects in the cell phone video because the cell phone is moving the entire time. It moves quite a bit when stops and shoots at the car because he's doing a lot with his hands.
A lot of people even think it's a bodycam video and are probably assuming its movement tracks the movement of his torso. If you make that false assumption, you're going to think he never stopped moving and that the car hit his body. But the cell phone video doesn't show that. All you know is his hand didn't stop moving and his hand hit the car, which you can see in the other videos.
Glassnoser
1d ago
Well at a minimum, it doesn't appear that the officer was trying to game the situation by setting up a situation here if the woman tried to drive away, then he'd have an excuse to shoot her.
It seems like that's exactly what he was trying to do. What in the video made you think that's not what was going on?
Also, it doesn't appear that this woman was just an innocent bystander or an "observer," but rather she was part of the crew that were trying to obstruct and provoke ICE agents.
Sure. I didn't think there were a lot of people taking that idea seriously.
Glassnoser
1d ago
I agree that it makes it more likely. I still think it's more likely she was not trying to do that. If the entire case hinged on the idea that it was reasonable for him to think she was trying to hit him, I would say that was false on the balance of probabilities, but would not rise to the level of proof beyond all reasonable doubt. The problem is that that is just one part of a whole series of things the officer needs to show in order to claim self-defence, including that it was reasonable for him to be standing there in the first place, that shooting her was his only option, that that danger still existed at the time at a point he could have decided not to shoot her, and that shooting her protected his life, each of which I think is false.
I also think it's still extremely unlikely she was trying to seriously injure him. I could buy that she intended to knock him over or something without seriously injuring him, maybe being unaware of how dangerous that was. I could also buy that she came close enough to doing that that he reasonably thought she had worse intentions, but I still think he knew enough to know that that wasn't very likely and if he did think it was likely, he had all the less reason to try to block her escape in that way. I also think it should have been clear to before he started shooting that she was not going to run him over. There are just too many very unlikely things that all have to be true for him not to be guilty.
Glassnoser
1d ago
It doesn't contradict that. I really get the impression many of the people in this thread haven't seen all of the videos, particularly the one shot from the other side of the street where you can see the front of the car. It's hard to tell what the car is doing from the cell phone video. But in the other video, it is perfectly clear when the car starts moving.
The one thing the cell phone video changed my mind about was how likely it was that she saw him. I was quite surprised about where she was looking while backing up. I thought it was very odd that she looked up while backing up instead of backwards or at the back-up camera. So I do think it's much more likely she knew he was in front of the car before she started driving forward.
However, she was focused on backing up and was probably glancing up at the rear view mirror, so I can imagine how she might have not really noticed him or if she had, how she could have failed to notice where he stopped walking while she was looking away (I think at the side view mirror).
This does make it more likely that she was trying to hit him, but I still think it wasn't very likely, especially not likely that she was trying to seriously injure him. Someone suggested that she might have been trying to gently tap him, which would certainly have been reckless. That's much more believable.
The doesn't undermine many of the other key facts, such as the fact that he unnecessarily and recklessly placed himself in danger seemingly to give himself an excuse to shoot her should she try to run away. Although it's quite possible he was simply being grossly negligent as to the likelihood she would try to escape.
Glassnoser
1d ago
He didn't shoot the wife, he shot the driver. The driver was not being aggressive in that video.
I don't see what difference it makes that they were trying to confront ICE officers. Is that supposed to support the idea that she was trying to run him over? Because that seems like a major stretch.
Glassnoser
1d ago
But he didn't act under that assumption or else he would not have shot her. What is not reasonable is to assume that someone in the process of backing up while a police officer yells at her repeatedly to get out of her car and while her wife tells her to drive away, is not about to drive away, but also to think that if she does drive away that it will be a murder attempt.
I have no interest in bending social convention to accommodate the homicidal.
What social convention is being bent? That police can always assume no one will try to hurt them? How is that social convention consistent with their carrying guns?
Then why are the police told not to do it? What does it accomplish? If it was reasonable for him to think he was going to die the second the car started moving, how is that consistent with the idea that it wasn't reckless to stand there?
Even shooting her did not prevent the car from coming at him. Lots of his defenders are arguing that he was both at imminent risk of severe bodily harm or death and that the car did in fact hit him, even though he shot her three times. If we grant that, then we have to admit that he was doing something very dangerous.
The police are allowed to do dangerous things, but not without sufficient purpose to justify the risk. What was accomplished by putting himself in that position? If we grant everything necessary to say that it was reasonable for him to be there, then what he must have been doing was helping to detain her by creating a situation where she could not flee without giving him an excuse to kill her. The police are explicitly told not to do that, and the outcome of this event shows exactly why.
The law is not actually set up to create death traps for those who don't cooperate with the police. Self-defence law revolves around preventing death, not around giving the police sufficient excuse to kill so as to induce cooperation.
By the way, the car was not stationary. It was backing up while he placed himself in front of it and then stopped for less than a second before moving forward. He knew she was being uncooperative and heard her wife telling her to drive away. He should have known what was about to happen and seemed to anticipate it when he moved his phone to his left hand and then drew his gun.
Glassnoser
1d ago
That's not shooting them for fleeing. That's shooting them to protect people.
The distinction is important because the law does, in fact, grant open season for any given criminal who wants to flee the police to do so long as he doesn't pose an imminent threat of severe bodily harm. Trying to use that as a reductio ad absurdum fails because the supposedly absurd scenario is unquestionably the current law.
They can, they simply have to have a reasonable belief that the person poses a threat to the officer or others.
A lot of people defending the shooting are being overly loose with what constitutes sufficient grounds for deadly force. It's important to stress that is generally not permissible to kill someone just because you have a reasonable belief he poses a threat to others. The vast majority of cases where such a threat exists would not a justify a killing, and this case, in my opinion falls squarely in that case.
The threat must be imminent and one that risks severe bodily harm, and the killing must be necessary to prevent it. The set of circumstances in which you can kill someone in self-defence is pretty narrow and being loose with the wording of the law in this way is wildly misleading.
Glassnoser
1d ago
I don't disagree. I'm asking whether we know that that's what she was accused of and whether she was in fact doing that. I know a little more than I did at the time, and so I can see what the basis for that claim is, but I'm still not sure the extent to which that was actually confirmed.
Glassnoser
1d ago
He didn't stand in front, he wasn't in front until she reversed.
There's no contradiction there. He got in front while it was reversing and then stopped in front of it.
And cops are absolutely allowed to stand in front of parked vehicles to keep them from fleeing.
The question is not about what they're allowed to do. It's about what they're instructed to do. Going against standard practice may be legal, but it is not reasonable, particularly if is aware of the dangers involved, as he would have to have been in order to believe his life was subsequently in danger.
I already addressed this in my other comment, but cops absolutely can shoot fleeing suspects if they reasonably believe they pose a threat to the cop or others. A lady whipping her car around with reckless disregard for the agents in order to escape (and, to the officer who got hit, with seeming intent to hit him) it is absolutely a justified shoot.
I agree with the first sentence, but I totally disagree with the later. It is not enough for the person to in some vague sense pose a danger. Driving at a low speed near others doesn't come anywhere close to the level of danger required to kill the driver. The threat must be one of imminent and severe bodily harm.
This idea that the police are justified in ending someone's life based on the remotest possibility of someone getting hurt is something I cannot understand.
Glassnoser
1d ago
I don't think that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about a specific argument that implies that Charlie Kirk's killing was justified while Renée Good's killing was not. We're talking about a person who believes Charlie's Kirk was justified and has a different argument for why Renée Good's death was not. One need not expect to find the former persuasive at all for the latter to be worth considering.
Glassnoser
1d ago
Are you being purposely obtuse here? You know why - because she tried to run him over with her car. It's on video. It's had been mentioned in this discussion dosens of times. How anybody engaging in good faith in this discussion could not know that?
I don't think she was trying to run him over. If she had been, why did she turn away from him? I can understand the argument that he didn't know that at the time he started shooting, but I can't understand the argument that she actually was trying to run him over.
The question is whether his false belief that she was trying to run him over was reasonable in the moment. It can only have been reasonable for him to go against standard police procedure and walk in front of a moving vehicle if he had a very strong prior based on the circumstances that she would not try to run him over. For that strong belief to have been immediately overcome the second she started moving towards him (something he should already have known she was about to do when she started backing up), it would take an enormous amount of information to update that. I don't see what happened for him to overcome that prior. He saw the car moving, he heard his partner yelling at her to get out of the car while she kept the doors locked and backed up. He had to know she was going to drive away. He stopped when she stopped, so he knew which way the car was facing. How could it have been such a big surprise when she started moving towards her that he immediately made the decision to shoot and kill her?
It can kill you for trying to kill them.
Not necessarily. The belief that you're trying to kill them must be reasonable, what they do to try to stop you from killing them must be necessary to prevent you from doing so, they must not have provoked you, and they must have made all reasonable attempts to avoid the situation.
You are being purposely obtuse again by making it sound like only one second of the whole event happened and other events, immediately preceding and following it, did not, while you perfectly know they did.
Everything I know about what preceded the event made what he did less reasonable. For example, the fact that he knew she was uncooperative, the fact that he deliberately and recklessly put himself in harms way, and the fact that she seemed calm and not aggressive towards him. What do you think happened that supports his self-defence claim?
We are discussing a specific event, and you keep purposely ignoring the actual circumstances of the event, while making theoretical statements.
You keep making overly general statements that do not apply in many circumstances and don't apply here for the reasons I've given. It is not generally true that the police have the right to kill people who threaten their lives. Initiation of violence does not on its own justify a violent response from the police, especially not a lethal one.
I think by this point it is clear you are not interested in discussing the particular event, but interested in extracting something like "since there could be a theoretical situation where police shooting would be wrong, the police can be wrong, therefore you just admitted the shooting is not justified!". I do not have any interest in this kind of discussion. When you are interested to discuss facts you may continue with somebody else.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument, but you keep making general statements to support your argument without addressing the particular details that I bring up that show why those statements don't apply, which indicates you think those are generally applicable statements. But they're not. You can't just fall back on a general rule when I bring up the details of this case if you admit that they are not general rules. The reason I'm bringing up hypothetical examples is to prove that the rule doesn't generally apply. It's not to avoid talking about this particular case. I'm showing that there are exceptions and other rules that apply and explaining how they apply to this case.
Glassnoser
1d ago
No, I'm not. I'm reading
since it basically makes it open season for any given criminal who wants to blast their way out of a traffic stop or chase.
As
The police cannot shoot someone to stop them from fleeing.
Glassnoser
1d ago
"Not trying to injure him" and "had no idea he was there" does not comport. If I'm in the driver's seat of a car and there is a pedestrian in my blind spot, and I move the car such that I would hit them, but I don't know that they are there, do you think it matters that I wasn't trying to injure them? I think an analogous situation is if I am firing a gun with my eyes closed, or pointing the gun in a direction I can't see.
You're making a common mistake I've seen people who defend the shooter make. The lack of reasonableness in her decisions does not make his decisions more reasonable.
I absolutely agree that she was driving recklessly and had she hit him, she'd have been at fault. But that, if anything, undermines the self-defence claim. He needs to show that she intended to run him over. If she isn't paying attention and he ought to know that, then that makes it less reasonable for him to believe she is trying to kill him.
Why is he to blame for information he didn't know (that she didn't want to injure him), while she doesn't take any blame for information she didn't know (that he was standing there)?
She can take plenty of blame. Her being blameworthy has no bearing on his self-defence claim.
The reason he takes blame for information he doesn't know is that he cannot just assume that someone is trying to kill him. The belief needs to be based on something. Given that in the vast majority of situations where someone is driving towards you, they're not trying to kill you, the less information he has about her intentions, the less reason he has to think she is trying to kill him.
Glassnoser
1d ago
The argument is not that he can only shoot her if it is guaranteed to stop the threat. The argument is that if it isn't reasonable even to think it might have stopped the threat, then his self-defence claim falls apart.
Keep in mind that to be found not guilty in court, he would have to prove a reasonable doubt based on the joint probability of a series of facts. He would have to show, at least to a level that generated reasonable doubt, that it was reasonable for him to put himself in front of a moving car, that he reasonably believed the car was headed towards him and risked severe bodily harm or death at the time of each shot that contributed to her death, that he didn't have time to get out of the way, and that shooting the driver of the car was necessary to prevent that severe bodily harm or death. If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that at least one of these facts is false, his self-defence claim falls apart.
Glassnoser
1d ago
Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.
Of course it does.
The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode.
Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.
Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second.
I'm not sure what to say other than I think it's absurd to suggest people have reaction times that are that slow. In that second he was able to track the vehicle as it turned and away, maintaining his aim as his line of sight moved from the side of the windshield over to the side of the car. The only thing his brain needed to process was the fact that he was at the side of the car. I don't think it takes anything close to a full second to visually process where an object is.
If it really were split seconds, then I would buy this argument, but I've watched the video many times and I think he had lots of time to process the situation. I don't even think the first shot was justifiable, so he only had that much more time to process the second shots. It's not the case that once the first shot was justifiable, the subsequent shots are automatically justfiable if they are close enough together. Each shot needs to be justified based on the totality of the circumstances, which includes the amount of processing he had done before the firing of the first shot.
I just think this requires a remarkable amount of leeway for how slow his processing is allowed to be to say he was justified in firing at that point, but I'm not sure how to prove that.
The word you're looking for is 'foment'.
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