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The cop shot her after she threw the boiling water at him. This is clear if you watch the video in slow motion. From my perspective, it also seems like she was trying to ambush him as he went around the counter.
Here's my timeline:
-She picks up the pot.
-The cop backs away.
-She asks why he's backing away.
-He says he's uncomfortable being near her while she's holding the boiling water.
-She threatens to rebuke him in the name of Jesus (i.e. fling the boiling water at him). That is to say she threatens to attack a police officer with the deadly weapon she is currently holding in her hands.
-He tells her that if she does he'll shoot her.
-She takes cover behind the counter.
-The cop advances, ordering her to drop the pot.
-She flings the boiling water at him. It does not connect.
-The cops shoots and kills her.
I do not find any part of this flirty or funny. You do not joke about attacking people with deadly weapons. You definitely do not joke about attacking on-duty cops with deadly weapons. If you "jokingly" say you're going to attack someone with a deadly weapon and then you actually do it then you clearly weren't joking.
That's not true and I'm not sure why you think it would be? If I pretend to stab at someone with a fork (a deadly weapon) then they go crazy (like the police officer) pull a gun on me and in a panic I actually do stab at them, it doesn't indicate that I originally indicated to stab them with a fork, because the circumstances has changed.
Did she act rationally? No, but I don't think that acting rationally when threatened with a gun should be a requirement of not being shot by police officers, who could have left the situation without meaningful consequences. If police officers can't be trusted to handle situations like that in a rational way, maybe they shouldn't have guns?
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I mean, I don't want to come off as needlessly pedantic but "he tells her that if she does he'll shoot her" seems like a phrase that doesn't quite capture it. He's screaming at her. He draws and points a gun. And even as communication goes I don't think it's effective at all. If you tell someone practically anything at the same time you point a gun at them, you know, chances are they aren't going to process it because they are busy processing a gun being pointed at them. <Okay, yes, he yells at her and then immediately draws the gun before she can respond, but it's still the same processing window> Clearly there's a disconnect -- in fact if you had paused the video at even the second "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" (pause right afterward that is) and asked me, assuming I had no context, "what do you think would happen next," her being literally dead in less than 10 seconds flat would not be on my bingo card, right? To me this doesn't come across as an "ambush" which implies premeditation, but rather an irrational stress reaction directly tied to the cop's aggressive response. Her behavior up to that point was less deranged and more simply someone possibly a little on the dumb side and clearly without their life together. Assuming maximum hostility just feels wrong here and I feel like cops often aren't fully aware how their actions appear on the receiving end. I mean for God's sake, the first words out of her mouth are "uh - okay - uh sorry" and crouching down. Surely that's not the language of someone angry enough to assault a cop, right?
This is a little flippant, but I do wonder if, similar to how if you're given a taser many police departments would require you to be tasered first just to know how it feels (or pepper sprayed for similar reasons), if cops were threatened with their lives at some point if it would affect their respect for their given power. Human psychology is just not well designed for instant compliance in a crisis.
My experience is that innocent people will freeze and back off. Non-innocent people… depends on what they were trying to do to begin with.
Not when a 200-pound man is angrily shouting obscenity-laden orders at you while brandishing a gun.
I’m less than 180 and don’t like obscenities, but like I said that’s my experience. Only cases I’ve seen that act differently were out to get someone - but even some of those would freeze. I’m open to hearing others’ experiences, of course.
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So do you think he might have originally intended to kill her, since he threatened her and got closer to her when he perceived her as threatening him with hot water? (Apparently, in your model, if he was innocent, he would freeze and back off in such a situation.)
You might say that policemen are trained to not freeze and back off from threats, but they are also trained to defuse situations and to remove themselves from a situation when appropriate. If he felt so unsafe from a woman with boiling water, he could have left the room and called for backup, or at least left to wait for her to calm down.
I'm not convinced he intended to kill her, rather than just couldn't handle the mental responsibilities he had undertaken as a police officer.
What are you talking about? She doesn't have a gun.
Edit: To clarify, I wouldn't classify any kind of operative as "innocent" anyway, so the cops aren't "innocent" in that case. Maybe "civilian" or "non-combatant" would be more accurate?
I thought you were suggesting that, if people don't have guilty conscience, they will react to threats by backing off. She didn't do that and he didn't do that.
She did have a potentially lethal weapon. That was his reason for pulling his gun her, after all.
I was saying that every time I pointed a gun at a civilian, and most times I ever pointed a gun at a bad guy, they would immediately freeze and back off. I’m not suggesting threats can let you see into man’s heart.
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Initially I only watched the first bodycam, and was trying to figure out how this could be anything other than an unambiguously bad shoot.
After seeing the second body cam, with the angle showing her tossing the pot, I still think it's a bad shoot, but maybe not quite so unambiguously.
My timeline:
She takes the pot off the stove and starts pouring the hot water into the sink. She and the cop are talking and sound like they are still laughing and joking. He says something about not wanting to be near hot water (but it appears that he backed away just as a default precaution, not because he really thought at this point that she was going to make a threatening move), and she says (twice) "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus."
This is clearly the moment when it starts to go south. I am not sure what she meant by that - her tone remains casual, and it sounds to me like she's joking. But it's a strange joke. I am familiar with evangelicals (and black evangelicals) and that's not usually the sort of thing they say "jokingly." The cop was clearly freaked out by it. Still not justification for drawing a gun on her, but I can see how his evaluation of this woman might have gone in a split second from "Old, dotty, and annoying" to "Possibly a dangerous nut who might throw hot water."
His words, though, were "You better fucking not," and then "I'll shoot you in the fucking face." She hasn't actually threatened him yet (other than talking about "rebuking him in the name of Jesus"). I don't think anyone would disagree that that's not how police should be trying to deescalate a situation even with an old dotty woman who might be crazy enough to throw hot water.
She continues to stand there. She seems confused. He draws his gun and points it at her. She immediately cringes and says "Okay, I'm sorry." She's obviously terrified at this point. She's still holding the hot water. He says "Drop the fucking pot!" She goes down on the floor.
She looks terrified and confused to me. She probably doesn't drop the water because, you know, she'd be dropping hot scalding water on her feet. Looks to me like she's holding the pot because she was afraid to set it down (while a gun is pointed at her) and she's afraid to drop it (because she'll burn herself).
They start going around the counter, and here is where the second body cam shows her throwing the pot. At this point the first cop shoots her.
There is one version here, where she crouched and prepared to launch the pot at the cops because she's deranged and thinks they're demons or something.
There is another where she crouched, terrified, as a cop pointed a gun at her and cursed her out, and when they came after her with their guns still pointed, she decided tossing the pot away from her was her best option.
Personally, I think the second version is more likely. She's clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, and now she's probably terrified and panicked. "I can't drop the pot because I will burn myself, but if I don't drop the pot he will shoot me, therefore I will throw the pot away" seems like a reasonable thing to be going through her mind (if, tragically, a very bad choice, especially since she threw it in the direction of the cops).
But to be honest, even if it turns out (from more footage or some other evidence) that she was deliberately throwing the pot at the cops, it was still a bad shoot. From the moment she's standing there holding a pot of water, they had a bunch of other options that didn't end in shooting her or getting hot water thrown at them.
It would be very hard to convince me that cop shouldn't be charged with murder.
The cop has been charged with murder. First-degree murder in fact.
The problem is even if she was throwing the water at them, a pot of water thrown across a room by a skinny crazy lady isn't a threat of great bodily harm. If she actually throws the pot basically nothing happens; they get splashed a little. If she tries to throw the water out of the pot, from that position, most of it probably ends up on her; she certainly can't hit them anywhere they'd be severely harmed.
I find "How far could she have thrown the pot?" questions kind of irrelevant. This is exactly the sort of thing we see after incidents like this where everyone suddenly becomes an expert on guns, knives, sprinting speeds, or the ability of old ladies to throw pots of hot water and how much damage hot water can do. It's all useless because there are too many variables and no one is actually making those calculations in the moment.
Like, let's stipulate that in theory she was physically capable of throwing the pot far enough to splash the cops. Still not buying that this was justification for them to react the way she did.
The cops sure as hell should be. Whether one is in reasonable fear of grave bodily harm depends on that.
If we accept that she was capable of and appeared to be about to throw the pot far enough to douse them (not just splash them) with the boiling (or just off-boil) water, they have a good case for self-defense.
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A two-handled large pot, from above your head? I tried it (with a half-full pot, since she had dumped some out) and mostly the water landed about 2 feet from me. I can throw it further, sure, with a good backswing. But not from that position.
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Quite so unambiguously perhaps is reasonable doubt, no? High standard to convict
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I don't think that's correct. My timeline is that the first shot was at 14:19.16 and the water became visible at 14:19.28.Did I miss an earlier indication that she was throwing it?EDIT: nevermind. I was going off of the first camera only.
After rewatching a few times, it's hard to definitively nail down the exact order of events because the officer's arm is in the way. I wish the camera was on his hat or something.
However, here are some key facts:
She put the pot back on the stove while taking cover, then picked it back up again and hoisted it over her head as the officer approached. I can't imagine any reason to do this except to throw it at the officer.
The pot landed on the chair quite a good distance in front of her. That means it must have had some forward momentum, and I can't see how that would happen unless she threw it.
I can't think of any other coherent explanation for this series of events. She must have picked the pot up and thrown it at the officer as he came around the counter.
See my post here (https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/233125?context=8#context) for my full breakdown of what happened and why I think she threw the pot.
EDIT: I just want to say, kudos for updating based on new information. This is obviously a situation with a lot of ambiguity. We're all trying to reconstruct extremely rapid events from multiple incomplete bodycam recordings. Given that level of uncertainty, the most important thing in finding the truth is going to be our ability to reassess based on new information as we become aware of it.
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Seems like an odd choice if your interlocutor has a weapon with a maximum effective range of approximately six feet while you have a firearm.
I mean, yes, but also no, a person wielding a weapon can charge in and close distance before the bullets put them down.
If she was holding a kitchen knife it would still be dangerous at that range.
As seen on Surviving Edged Weapons (on Red Letter Media).
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I’m not clear how that makes advancing seem tactically sensible.
If you're not going to run and escape the situation (which would be my advice for that scenario, shes not a danger to others) then you damn well better make sure you have the clearest shot possible.
If the opponent is behind a barrier like a kitchen counter, guess what you gotta move in to make sure you have a shot.
Being stuck in close quarters with a melee attacker is nightmarish, even if you have a pistol.
If escape isn't viable, then tactically speaking advancing on the opponent is a "sound" choice. Something about how meeting danger head on can nearly halve it, or whatever.
Again, I'm just pointing out how the presence of the weapon is a larger factor than people give credit for. Not praising the cop's reaction.
One thing about the George Floyd case, the guy was unarmed and completely restrained when he died. That's what really made it stand out.
This... ain't quite that.
The cops had a standoff weapon. She had a pot of boiling water. Not a knife. An awkward-as-hell, single-use pot of boiling water. Make it so she has to turn a corner to get to you and the weapon is neutralized. She comes running towards that corner with the water, THEN you can shoot her.
My dude if you want to get in a fight with someone that has a pot of boiling water, and then wait until the person is actually closing on you swinging the pot before acting, be my guest.
I'll just say, if somebody I don't know shows up at my house holding a pot of obviously boiling liquid, I ain't opening the door. If they attempt to throw the liquid at me, I'm assuming hostile intent. If they are still wielding the pot and try to come into my house, I AM shooting them at that point. And living in a Castle Doctrine state, the law will likely absolve me of guilt.
The situations aren't directly analogous, but that's how I'm interpreting the presence/use of the weapon in this case.
If I'm faced with the situation in the video, I will have tried to extricate from the scenario as soon as the pot comes into play, in hopes of not being forced into a split-second decision with someone's life, even if its not mine, hanging in the balance.
Yeah, I can't just kill someone for holding a pot of boiling water in her own house.
It was her castle.
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My guess would be that once you've concluded that the subject is armed and dangerous, your job becomes securing them and ending the confrontation. If they're willing to threaten you with a pot of boiling water, how do you know they don't have a gun on them or nearby, and will escalate as soon as you turn your back? Once they've initiated a confrontation, it seems that police policy is to end that confrontation as decisively as possible, not to back off and give the suspect space to maneuver, escape, or arm themselves better.
I guess there's a question of reasonableness. Could you assume they have a cache of grenades in the cabinet? Are they hiding trained attack tigers in the attic?
Whole problem for me is that most of the danger was avoidable if they don't let the lady get off the couch. If they thought she was dangerous at the outset, then don't let her get the boiling water.
Once she does, maybe exit the house and see if she escalates further.
I don't buy that they feared for their safety up until a second or two before she threw that water.
Did they, though? I haven't watched the video, mostly just skimmed some of the comments here. But I could imagine them not even thinking about her possibly threatening them with a pot of water; who does that?! Instead, just give her a moment to turn the stove off, then she's not worried about it or whatever, and they can continue doing whatever they need to do. It's only after she grabs the pot and appears threatening with it that they might think, "Oh shit, that can be a weapon; what did we get ourselves into?"
What I'm really thinking is that this is something I could totally see myself doing (the not thinking about a pot of boiling water being a potential weapon bit, not various other things). I'm not sure if it would cross my mind until some sort of threatening action was taken with the pot in hand. It's too ingrained in my classification circuits as "just cooking".
Right, but its simultaneously hard to understand why their immediate response to seeing the boiling water in her hand is "I'm will shoot you in the face."
I guess I'm suggesting that their failure to control the scene was a problem. Okay, they don't see the boiling water as a danger until she's holding it. Maybe that's a training flaw in itself.
If they didn't think she was posing any danger prior to that point, I'm confused as to why that escalated to "I'm going to shoot" you nigh instantaneously. If they DID think she was a possible danger, then just keep her on the couch and shut off the stove off yourself, don't let her roam around to, e.g. grab a knife or set something on fire.
Why they made the actual choices they made, what was wrong with their training, and what they could have done better is above my pay grade. I just think that if one of the questions is why did they seem to not take a pot of water as a threat at the beginning, but did immediately after she grabbed it, a plausible answer would be that they're almost as dumb as me and just mentally binned it in a completely different bin, just thinking about turning a stove off rather than it being a possible weapon. I could also see myself being able to read someone's face/body language as they pick up a pot like that and immediately think, "Oh shit, I guess that can be a weapon, and they might be wanting to use it."
When I was younger, I worked at a daycare for a bit. I had one troubled kid kind of try to attack me with a pair of scissors. I knew that he caused a variety of problems and that one of my main long-term goals was to try to improve his behavior, since he was one of the biggest trouble spots, but I hadn't really thought that he might actually try to attack me up to that point. The attempt was kinda pathetic, really, but it was also a moment where I very suddenly went from not thinking about him having scissors, because we had scissors and the kids used them for various things, to, "Oh shit, this fucking punk might actually try to stab me with a pair of scissors!" I'm also glad that I didn't have millions of people on the internet scrutinizing my reaction; I think I did okay, but I could definitely imagine hyper-critics going overboard on silly stuff.
I have a slight sense that there's a Schrodinger's Cop problem here. People want cops to stop being overly paranoid about possible threats, especially when they're more hypothetical than real, but when a hypothetical threat becomes a real threat, they want to complain that they weren't paranoid enough about the hypothetical threat before it became a real threat.
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You are correct, and the phrase you're looking for is "Tueller Drill".
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Except she wasn’t charging, she was cowering in the ground in her own home while somebody pointed a gun at her after theatening to shoot her in the fucking face.
I wouldn't get into the mechanics of it all, but a person "cowering" with a weapon can very quickly turn into a person "charging" with a weapon. They are not neutralized/incapacitated merely by laying on the floor.
The greater context of the situation very much weighs against shooting her, but I really think people don't get how the presence of a weapon, ANY weapon, escalates the nature of the threat.
Here's a 2020 incident where the perp surprises and slashes one officer, who doesn't immediately shoot her, perp drops the knife and appears to comply for a moment, then suddenly swoops down to pick it up again and charges another officer.
https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/bodycam-footage-florida-woman-stabs-cop-ahead-of-fatal-shooting/
Until the person is either fully restrained or, unfortunately, poked full of holes, they are posing a danger.
The weapon in the current case being boiling water is a really unique twist, but the principle is the same.
These cops are also posing a danger to her.
Well yeah they came into her house and started making demands and bossing her around. I wouldn't blame her for feeling threatened.
It is unclear how her actions improved on the situation though.
To be clear, my presumption whenever a standard police encounter results in a death is to assume the cops fucked up royally. That seems to be the case here. It is a rebuttable presumption, though.
She acted irrationally, but if people have to walk on eggshells around police to avoid being shot, then people (especially mentally unstable people) will tend to avoid the police at all costs, which is not good for law enforcement. (Not suggesting you disagree.)
Right. I think the whole problem with judging these situations is that they tend to be interactions between cops, who are already edgy about being ambushed, and less-than-rational types who are edgy because they know they might be arrested or they're just suffering from a mental condition that affects judgment. Cops are more likely to encounter those types than the average citizen. So these interactions come with some extra hostility/tension built in.
(there's valid debate as to how much of this cops bring upon themselves when they have a very aggressive approach to policing and the fact that they have less accountability)
For example, here are a couple other semi-recent police encounters:
One where the cops take out a dude who is directly threatening another person's life:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zi4Lw981G9w?si=E5riO0NlRu_KEIq4
Obvious good shoot, with plenty of time to set up, take aim, attempt de-escalation, and act at the most opportune moment.
And another where holy shit a 'standard' traffic stop IMMEDIATELY results in automatic gunfire their way:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6UzsEvst1MI?si=a2bokSAmX2vJGAct
These are the two extremes of the sort of situations cops can find themselves in.
We'd all love for every police shooting to look like the first: obvious justification, attempts at de-escalation, and minimal force employed (one bullet, in that case). But cops have a general (not entirely rational, odds are they'll never face such a situation) concern about suddenly being confronted with the second situation.
So I dunno, I don't blame police for treating suspicious characters with a vague sense of hostility, but some subset of those characters are going to respond very badly to their presence, and if they're truly irrational, then we should be scrutinizing the cop's actions harder, overall.
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No, she DOES rebuke him in the name of Jesus. This is in no way, shape, or form, threatening to fling boiling water at him. Unless it's perhaps a reference to a ceremony which does involve flinging water, like an exorcism; perhaps the cops were thinking that, in which case they probably should not use horror movies as training films.
And this was a dumb move. Why advance?
I don't see any flinging. I see shooting, and then the boiling water is on the ground. The steam from the boiling water isn't visible until after the shooting begins.
Here, let me break it down for you. Timestamps are from this video if you want to check it yourself: https://youtube.com/watch?v=U2rMB2fYjuY&rco=1&ab_channel=PoliceActivity
10:37: She clearly takes both hands off the pot and raises them above her head.
10:38: She crouches behind the counter. The pot is visible on the stove. She is no longer holding the pot.
The bodycam is briefly blocked by the officer's arm.
10:40: She is now standing up again and she seems to have picked the pot back up and is now hoisting it over her head. To repeat, she put the pot down and then picked it back up again. I cannot imagine any reason she would have for hoisting a pot of boiling water over her head except to throw it.
also 10:40: The pot leaves her hands. Roughly simultaneously, the officer shoots her. It's hard to tell the exact timeline of events, except...
10:41: The pot lands on the chair in front of her. For this to happen, it must have had considerable forward momentum. It looks to me like she had at least begun to throw the pot when the bullet connected. If not then it should have landed on top of her, not on the chair in front of her.
It's possible (again, hard to break down this 1-second period from Youtube footage) that the cop interrupted her throw by shooting her, which means it quite possibly could have had more momentum if he hadn't shot her. If so, it's possible that if he hadn't shot her it would have hit him and inflicted life-ruining burns. It's also possible he didn't shoot until after she completed her throw, in which case it wouldn't have hit him regardless. Either way, it's clear that she had attempted to inflict life-ruining injuries on him at the time she was shot.
I'm interpreting the vision differently to you. Up until 10:38 we're in agreement: The pot is on the counter, she's crouched down on the floor, the cops have their guns on her, and they're screaming at her to "drop the fucking pot" which she doesn't have.
Then she half-stands up again and appears to be reaching for the pot, and at that point the cop shoots her. I don't see anything that looks like her hoisting the pot over her head.
The pot spills and steam comes up from the water on the floor. I can't see where the pot ends up but I don't see it on the chair.
My interpretation of the video is that these guys with guns repeatedly screaming at her to "drop the fucking pot" when she didn't have it made her reach for it so she could do what they said? Or something?
Edit: Never mind, other camera angle with slow mo does show her throwing the pot and it ending up on the chair.
I still put the blame on the cop in this scenario. I can understand why her throwing the pot would make him pull the trigger, but ultimately this was not a tense or dangerous situation at all until he started threatening to shoot her in the face out of nowhere, and she did not act with lethal force.
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There's no way she's going to throw the water at the cop effectively from the position she's in at 10:40. My read is she was lifting it over her head (possibly to try to place it on the stove), he shot her, and she tipped the pot forward as she died.
It's water, not acid. There's now way she could throw it into his face, which is the only way he was going to get life-ruining burns.
Also, water is heavy. The pot appears to be a least medium size, but probably large, it's a proper pot and she's using two hands. You can't actually throw pots like that very far, especially since the water tends to slosh around making them pretty unwieldy.
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She had already put it down once. You're suggesting that:
She picked the pot up.
She put the pot down.
She took cover behind the counter.
She picked the pot up again and lifted it over her head - while still taking cover - with no intention to do anything with it except put it back on the stove for a second time.
Why? If she didn't intend to throw the pot then why would she bother picking it up again? Remember, at this point in the timeline she's already taken cover behind the counter because the cop threatened to shoot her. What possible reason would she have for picking up the pot after taking cover, except to use it as a weapon?
I could imagine being confused and flustered and having a confused thought like "if they're afraid of the pot of water I'll just take it off the heat and put it away".
Maybe, but the whole - lifting it over her head in a throwing posture makes it less likely that she was planning on putting it away and more likely about to attack the officers with it.
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She's nuts. Also she's being shouted and cursed at by large men with guns, which will fluster anyone, believe me.
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