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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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She may have been off her rocker, but she didn't "throw" the boiling water until the shots were fired. And there was basically no way she was going to be able to harm them with it from where she was. Bad shoot.

I guess my question to you (and anyone else who is in the "bad shoot" camp): if she had unambiguously thrown the water before being fired upon, and this could be proven, would that make you update to something like, "it was an unfortunate situation but the officers were acting in self-defense," or would you still maintain that the officers were in the wrong/should be charged with murder?

There are quite a few hypotheticals that would move it to "regrettable (but not punishable) mistake" territory, but I'm having a hard time getting to "good shoot" without completely disregarding the agreed-upon facts.

If she was closer, faster, and aggressively flung the water at an officer, then I could forgive him for acting rashly in the heat of the moment. The best option would have been to manage the social interaction better, and the fallback would have been to manage the tactical situation better so that the limited range and one-shot nature of the pot mitigates the threat. Failing both of those, boiling water is dangerous enough to merit deadly force.

I think there's enough there to drive some debate if you're just reading commentary, but I'm firmly in team "bad shoot" after watching the video.

EDIT: found the second camera angle. With a bit better aim, the officer would have been hospitalized. The situation is close enough to my "hypothetical" (lol) that I'm applying that judgment.

I would still be in the bad shoot camp. Throwing boiling water at someone is a terrible thing to do and I wouldn't begrudge them being pretty rough with her in response, but it's a one-shot deal. She's not going to be reloading the pot to continue her assault on the officers. I can imagine extenuating circumstances, but they'd have to be pretty weird. I'm not likely to get on board with shooting someone dead in their own home on the basis of an attack that can mostly be stopped by taking two steps backwards.

Still in the wrong, because there was no reasonable fear of injury, let alone the grievous injury you would need to justify lethal force. There was no way she was going to be able to get any significant amount of scalding water on the cop's unprotected face or upper body from the position and distance she was in.

If a paraplegic octogenarian with a knife is crawling towards me to try and stab me that doesn't justify a shooting. There has to be genuine danger.

Clothes do not protect you from boiling water; they actually aggravate scalding injuries by holding the water next to skin.

A pot of boiling water is a one-shot item. Once she threw the water and missed, what was she going to do, refill it, wait 5 minutes for it to reboil, and then throw it again? Throw the pot itself? Okay, that's not fun, but not an imminent lethal threat. This wasn't a situation where someone was going to be harmed without officer involvement; there wasn't even a concern about passing fake money a la Floyd. There was nothing stopping the officers from just turning around and leaving the domicile of the crazy lady who thought she saw a non-existing prowler.

There's still no way she was going to harm them with it from where she was. If they were really worried they could have stepped back behind the counter as they initially did; they were tall enough to still keep an eye on here from there.

If she wanted to even hit them significantly, she'd have needed to get a good backswing and hurl the water. If you could show she was doing that, maybe they'd have a case. But she wasn't.

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