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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Getting drunk during pregnancy is how the "Greatest Generation" created the boomers.
And that should result in a death sentence?
I made no such conclusion.
I mean, the facts are pretty straightforward: she used a deadly weapon (a motor vehicle) to attack pedestrians (the officers).
Had she simply submitted to the initial arrest, she would have faced a fine and some community service. Shoplifters rarely face anything more serious than that. In an attempt to avoid those minimal consequences, she chose to escalate from a simple property crime to assault with a deadly weapon. The best she could hope for would have been a lengthy prison sentence.
No, the case is straightforward and boring. The only interesting factor I found in it was fetal alcohol syndrome.
According to the police.
According to the video.
The one that was released after your comment. You believe anything anyone who shoots a black person says.
Trust, but verify. I believed them when they said they had a video, and I believed them when they provided a written description of the video. They would look extraordinarily bad to be caught lying about something so easy to verify, so I saw little reason not to trust.
It fit the pattern: individual gets caught committing a minor criminal act, but rather than facing the music and accepting the slap on the wrist punishment, they instead choose to escalate to the point of endangering people, and then Pikachu-face when they get shot.
What does her race have to do with this case?
Did "being black" stop her from hearing or understanding the officer calmly ordering her to get out of the car? Did "being black" prevent her from seeing the other officer in front of her vehicle? Did "being black" force her to put the car in gear and depress the accelerator?
I'll save my outrage for cases like Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and other actual victims of police abuse. I have no sympathy for someone who would endanger lives to avoid facing minimal and deserved consequences for their own criminal actions.
Witness states she put down the bottles before she left the store. The description of the video states she accelerated towards an officer. The video shows an officer step in front of the slow rolling vehicle. He even takes a step forward right before he jumps on the hood. He was also able to safely get away from the slow moving vehicle after he fired a shot, something that he could have done before choosing to end a life
Whether she did or did not take the bottles is completely irrelevant to the shooting. A complaining witness claimed she had; officers had sufficient cause to conduct a stop and investigate that complaint.
The video shows an officer stepped in front of a stopped vehicle. That vehicle was later driven toward the officer. The description is accurate; your claim is not.
Pedestrians have the right-of-way over vehicles. Even if she was moving when he stepped in front of her, she was obligated to stop, both under traffic laws, and per the lawful instructions given by the officers. She was not justified in driving toward the officer.
She escalated from being suspected of shoplifting to committing assault with a deadly weapon.
That might be relevant if he had a "duty to retreat" from the assault. Do you believe he had a legal obligation to retreat? If so, under what legal theory do you believe he acquired that obligation?
Rhe police had her license plate number. Her physical description. They had the nature of her offence being a non-violent crime. The car did not quickly accelerate and the police officer against all common safety advice put himself in the path of the vehicle.
That his first action was to pull a gun and fire and not just get out of the way and approach the problem at a later time in a less heated situation is excessive force. Back when I worked security I watched lots people pull this stunt on police officers before and surprise - none of them got shot and none of the police got hit by a car and everybody still got their resisting arrest charge at the end if the day.
If you are scared enough your psychological reaction is to stay in a place of safety or to flee and cars provide the opportunity to both... Which is why you aren't supposed to put yourself in the path of someone's potential escape with your body. People are panicy animals who can divert entirely to basic instinct, particularly when they are hurt or in a lower estimation of being able to defend themselves like pregnancy.
This is an example of someone killed because of bad police training and decision making that ignored entirely how scary even normally benign police interactions can be to black women. If she was worried about harm to her baby because of the police's habit of putting people forcefully on the ground or slamming them against cars she would be placed under extreme distress having one yell at her to leave her car like they meant to do her violence.
The police here created wholecloth the "need" to shoot this woman. From the moment they started escalating, blocking her route of egress and not taking the moment of thought to ask if this could not be de-escalated and addressed later safely given the minor nature of the complaint.
The officer's decision to stand in front of her car may indeed be "against all common safety advice". For your argument to prevail, however, you will have to go a little further. You will have to demonstrate that his actions were unlawful, or otherwise so egregious as to justify her deliberately moving her vehicle toward him. Unfortunately for your argument, there is no legal prohibition against him standing in front of her car.
Without that justification, her actions posed a credible, criminal, imminent, threat of death or grievous bodily harm, which justifies the use of any level of force, up to and including lethal force, to stop that threat.
You have not answered my question. Did the officer have a duty to retreat? If so, under what legal theory do you believe that duty arose?
Scared or not, she had a legal duty to follow the officer's lawful instructions. Scared or not, she had a legal duty to yield to a pedestrian in the path of her vehicle. Neither her race nor her sex nor her medical condition relieve her of those legal duties.
They may gain the legal justification needed to avoid prison in the States but here in Canada they would be fucked and they would have had the legal duty to retreat. The duty of police here is to merit only so much force as is required in a situation for all parties to get to safety and reassess if the situation merits any harm. Even if someone takes a swing at you with a weapon lethal force is only justified if all other potential options for resolving the conflict have been exhausted. Since she was rolling very slowly the potential threat to life was low. The officer had time to both draw and aim a weapon which means he also had time to remove himself from the psth of the car. Also the scope of the percieved crime comes into play. It was a non-violent supposed theft of property. Here unless someone has seen the uninterrupted process of selection, concealment and removal from property the crime is not chargable. Stores however are able to ban customers from their premises based on the criteria of suspicion of prior theft. So an arrest made under the circumstances of incomplete suspicion of theft would likely just fall apart in court. Escalating to yelling at her and making her feel her life is threatened in the first place for such a mild offence would have been considered at least a little dodgy. Ideally here police are supposed to utilize means to de-escalate conflict. Losing their cool for a minor charge and escalating the conflict to yelling even if the case was airtight would have been seen as a need to retrain them.
Here's what thia would have looked like in my country. They would have stated the person was under arrest and was to leave the vehicle, tell them the legal consequences of resisting arrest but to do so in a calm.way that keeps the situation safe for all. If the cost to safety of themselves and the public of enforcing the arrest is too dangerous given the nature of the crime then any force applied would be potentially considered improper use of force. Since the he only thing endangered is a small amount of property the authority of the officer neither of those things are worth more than the safety of all involved. Legal ramifications can happen safely elsewhere after everyone has cooled off. They had the tools to do that.
The police here would not be justified. The limitations of their powers are that their first duty is to the safety and to protect the lives of the public and themselves. Their authority to command is entirely second to this. The question of "were there ways to resolve this safely for all parties without a non-violent resolution" would be asked. But even if something is lawful does not make it just.
Regardless of ruling, what happened here is essentially that these officers placed more value on an inflated idea of their authority than the safety of themselves and the woman. They placed themselves in the path of harms way for a percieved stolen property under $50. They shot someone and effectively killed two because they felt justified doing so for a charge of property under $50. Their first reaction they made to being lightly jostled by a car was not to remove themselves from her path and pursue the charge later with the tools they had or even to draw a weapon to warn her to stop and give her a second chance of compliance. Their first reaction was to draw take a second to aim and then fire a lethal shot. At the end of the day she was killed for an improper reaction to authority over a tiny amount of property that the police valued more than her safety.
If that is the society you want I am at least glad that I don't have to live in it. For a country that calls itself "land of the free" the powers you give to police is inhumane.
Yes, Canada prosecutes victims of violent attacks for not running away fast enough, and causing harm to their attackers.
Generally speaking, the US does not. In most of the US (36 of 50 states), we have legislatively affirmed that the victim's decision to meet force with force is unassailable. The presence of a potential means of retreat does not negate a self defense claim; the victim is free to do anything they believe necessary to end the threat posed by the attacker. Our license to use force ends when the threat ends.
That is a power we claim for ourselves, and not one given solely to our cops.
No, what Canada has done right is enacting a stronger social safety net. Universal healthcare, for example. Your citizenry has a greater expectation of aid and comfort than ours, and that has translated to much less of the kinds of desperation that drive criminal activity. The US certainly has many things to learn from Canada, but "duty to retreat" is not one of them.
You are assuming a lot here. The USA also procecutes victims for not running away fast enough and causing harm to their attackers. There is a history of people in your country as well who have been charged after defending themselves from a violent assault / rape / murder attempt even in states with more protected self defense clauses
( non exhaustive examples : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/us/marissa-alexander-released-stand-your-ground.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/how-far-can-abused-women-go-to-protect-themselves)
So I posit that your concept of how law works in the case of self defense is a lot more similar between our two countries than you think. The difference lies in how much power and authority we grant police as a society. Here becoming a cop is either a 2 year standardized college course or a 6 month intensive boot camp for RCMP hopefuls as a primer and then an apprenticeship cadet program working under a seasoned officer. The techniques taught as absolute basic are soft skills, psychology, critical thinking, legal knowledge as well as self defense and weapon skills. While they are granted some extra authority over a regular citizen for the most part their rights are the exact same as any regular citizen in terms of how excessive force works.
Your citizenry's permissiveness in wild west style police justice kills people needlessly. It's the people's expectations as a whole that grant them the sort of powers of an occupying military force. The entire model of policing is needlessly dangerous and values following orders more than people's welfare.
If you're using Marissa Alexander to demonstrate your point, you either don't understand the laws governing use-of-force, or you don't understand her case. Or both. Her case was similar to that of Jerome Ersland. Both used lethal force well after the justifying threat had ended. That's not self-defense. That's murder. Like many of the people in this thread, neither Alexander nor Ersland properly understood the laws governing use-of-force.
I haven't reviewed the Brittany Smith case, but I suspect I'll find a similar problem.
I reject your characterization of defensive force as "police justice". You can certainly find cases where police have used excessive force, such as Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, George Floyd. But these cases are the rare exception, and our citizenry is certainly not "permissive" of them.
The process of "justice" starts when the accused submits to the authority of the courts. Fleeing from the court's jurisdiction invites the use of force; using deadly force in an attempt to flee endangers lives and thus invites a lethal response.
So we agree that excessive force is still a thing in the US! Ah good I had no bloody clue what you meant about "people not running away fast enough" but you interpreted me saying that all peaceful avenues of resolution including retreat being exhausted before life or body threatening violence is justified.
The process of justice should be secondary to the safety of citizenry and dynamic in it's application. If you are treating someone who passed a counterfeit bill or performed some act of petty theft like they have surrendered all of their rights and put them in a place of danger or kill them because of it then you have put the process of law and authority before people and thus the cart before the horse.
And you are permissive. Listen to yourself and all the comments here which argue that the cops had every right to kill this woman. None of it considering how a family was shattered for something so mundane as two bottles of wine and the hurt egos of a couple of officers who felt right cornering her in her car and yelling at her until she was flustered enough to make a mistake. Literally a two second mistake. She might not even have hit the gas, she might have just taken her foot off the brake. You condone this. In your heart of hearts what is right is a just is a dry calculation that has no empathy for people who do not behave when they are scared. How a single slip up justifies their death and exonerates these officers. If a jury thinks like you then these officers WILL go scott free. That is permissiveness. That is why your police are going to do this again and again and never be incentivized to be better and to properly de-escalate where possible. If the municipalities whom these cops are employed by aren't moved to step up and enforce upon their officials and police that this is not okay then the easiest course is to just do what they were doing before. Nothing ever gets better and more people will die for stupid reasons.
Duty to retreat == "you will be aconvicted if you don't run away from your attacker fast enough"
When you face a credible, criminal, imminent threat of death or grievous bodily harm, whatever action you take to survive is acceptable. Nobody should be able to argue "you didn't run away fast enough" and convict you for trying to survive. The person with a "duty to retreat" is the violent criminal attacker, not their victim. Placing that duty on the imperiled person violates that person's civil rights and human rights.
Correct. What you fail to understand is that the officer is a member of the citizenry. The process of justice is, indeed, secondary to the lives of those imperiled by an unlawful use of lethal force.
You keep getting hung up on the alleged shoplifting. The shoplifting is irrelevant to the shooting. She was not shot because she was shoplifting.
Your focus should be on the fact that she drove her car into a person, without caring about the harm she could cause in doing so. Deliberately driving a car into a person is assault and battery with a deadly weapon. She was shot to stop the immediate danger she posed to her intended victim. That is not a "single slip up". That is not justifiable simply because she is "scared".
You keep talking about how the officer put himself in harm's way. That is victim blaming. You wouldn't say that a woman puts herself in harms way by wearing a short skirt. If she is raped, criminal liability rests solely on the rapist, no matter how "recklessly" she wore her skirt. Likewise, full criminal liability for deliberately driving into a pedestrian falls on the driver, not the pedestrian.
Agreed. What we need, desperately, is for our laws governing the use of force to be taught to everyone and not just to police, lawyers, judges, and concealed carriers. Cops keep "getting away" with killing people because they are following the letter of the law. They are "getting away with it" because the government trains them - and only them - on the law.
Every justifiable homicide at police hands is an indictment of our government providing officers with this training, while withholding it from the public at large. We should be demanding the same training in our schools, and not just the police academy.
At this point it is obvious to me that you have not listened to anything I have said. Your authoritarian stance is incompatible with a model of compassionate de-escalation and you are more interested in being right on the technicality of law. Discussing this with you further is a waste of effort.
I disagree with you on only one issue of inportance: that the officer should have allowed her to leave.
I support de-escalation, and compassionate policing, and these officers did a reasonable job on that point. The first officer spoke calmly and respectfully. His voice was raised only enough to be heard through the window and over the engine, and was lowered when she opened that window. When he could not convince her to get out of the car, he attempted to negotiate a less stressful compromise: do not leave.
Could he have done a better job at de-escalation? Maybe. Maybe not. De-escalation requires the subject's cooperation. They have to be willing to accept a less-hostile engagement. There might have been something he could have said or done to entice her voluntarily cooperation. There might not. She might have escalated to violence no matter what was said or done. His inability to de-escalate the situation says far more about her than about him.
I disagree on one other point: Expecting her to comply with her duty to avoid hitting pedestrians with her car isn't accurately described as "authoritarian". Authoritarian generally refers to restrictions on much higher order behaviors, such as noise restrictions or code enforcement. "Not hitting people with your car" is far too basic a concept for that. Killing someone for leaving their trash cans out after trash day is authoritarian. Killing someone while they are actively trying to kill you is not.
The most authoritarian concept discussed in this thread is the idea that a pedestrian officer should not use force on a driver who is actively trying to run him over.
One thing I whole heartedly agree on is that further discussion with you is, indeed, a waste of effort.
It's the only reason you believed the police before they released the video.
As though you don't have excuses for why each of them had it coming too.
No. I believed their easily verifiable description of the events.
I'm more pissed off about each of them than you are. Castile in particular.
It wasn't verifiable before they posted the video. In the absence of evidence, you believed the people who shot a black person.
I don't think you understood my point. You seem to have missed an important difference in meaning between "verified" and "verifiable".
"Three angels can dance on the head of a pin" is not a verifiable statement. It can't be proven true or false. "There are three cats in this bag" is readily verifiable, even if that fact has not yet been verified.
Their claims were readily verifiable at the moment they made them; they were verified when the video was released.
Knowing that the police would want to paint themselves in as positive light as possible, and knowing how bad they would look in getting caught making so blatant a lie, trusting their statement was not unreasonable.
You believed them immediately without evidence.
Not exactly true.
The evidence I had was the specific nature of their claim. They claimed they would be showing me a video of a woman driving a car at an officer. That is a verifiable claim: if the video eventually shows something else, everyone observing it will immediately know that the initial claim was a bald-faced lie.
Contrast with a non-verifiable claim, such as "the officer felt endangered". That isn't something that can be definitively proven. The officer may have felt endangered. The officer may have felt perfectly safe and is simply lying to portray themselves in a better light.
Where the only "proof" of their claim is the claim itself, and they have a motivation to lie about it, we cannot trust them to speak the truth. But, where the "proof" of their claim is an objectively verifiable fact that will soon come to light, there is little reason not to trust it: they would immediately destroy their credibility to lie about a verifiable fact.
The evidence I had was their readily verifiable claim. A specific, objective fact, easily demonstrated if true, and easily refuted if false. I trusted that they weren't so fucking stupid as to lie about an objective fact. Turns out that they were, indeed, telling the truth in that specific case. That doesn't mean they are telling the complete, unvarnished truth about everything. They could be lying about everything I can't verify. But I don't need their non-verifiable claims; the verifiable ones exonerate the officers.
The evidence you had was a cop said it.
Huh. And it turns out they weren't lying.
Just out of cutiousity, who is telling you that the cops are always lying? Are you going to believe that person in the future, now that you have clear, compelling evidence that cops don't always lie?
I don't believe cops until I have proof. You believe them immediately.
Nah, that is not a fair conclusion.
I believe police only where their claims are readily verifiable. When they tell me it's 9:30AM, I'll believe them. I'm still going to check my watch to verify their claim, and I'll get plenty suspicious if and when their claim conflicts with the facts, but that didnt happen here.
When they tell me something that can't be verified, I don't trust it.
You have insinuated that my trust of police is unconditional; that is a lie. You have insinuated that my trust in police is racially motivated. That, too, is a lie. Both of those insinuations arise from your own assumptions, not from my statements, arguments, or reality.
I wait for proof because police are untrustworthy. It's irresponsible to just take police at their word and use their justifications on the off chance that they haven't covered their bodycam or "lost" the footage.
I think you're willing to believe the police when proof is not available, and that you're willing to take at face value what a racist institution puts out there.
There was no claim of lost footage. A claim of lost footage is not easily verifiable. Is the footage really lost? Or is it "conveniently" lost? There is room for them to tell a plausible lie: you and I can't prove that the footage actually existed. It is possible that it never did, and it is possible that if it did, it was inadvertantly destroyed. It's also possible that someone is lying their ass off to protect themselves, knowing we cannot positively verify the truth of their claim.
I would not trust a claim that is not verifiable, but they didn't make a non-verifiable claim here. The claims they made were readily verifiable, even though they had not yet been verified.
If they had no intention of releasing it, the lie they would have told would have been that it didn't exist, or was lost. I can't conceive of a reason why they would say "we will release it at " with the intention of being deceitful. That's an easily verifiable claim: they either release it, or they don't. There is no room for them to receive with that claim: they will be caught on such a deception in short order, and being caught in a blatant, overt lie is far more damaging to their credibility than a strong but unproven suspicion that they are lying.
Likewise with the content of the video. If they are going to release it, it doesn't make any sense that they would tell a bald face lie about what we are going to see in it. Again, there is no room for them to deceive: they will be caught on such a deception in short order.
Neither of these claims had been verified, but the nature of both claims was easily verifiable. They aren't going to deliberately destroy their credibility, so it is reasonably safe to trust their easily verifiable claim, even before it is actually verified.
Depends on the nature of the claim, not the entity making it.
"I'm going to show you a video of a woman driving her car at an officer" - yes, I'm going to trust that claim without proof, until such time as the claim is disproven.
"None of the 11 officers present had their body cameras turned on, and the dash cameras from the 8 cruisers present were all faulty or pointing away from the scene" - no fucking way am I going to trust that claim.
I think that in the absence of proof, you broadly assume the police are guilty until proven otherwise. I don't think you actually wait for proof; I think you jump immediately to a conclusion based not on the circumstances of the case, but on the races and/or jobs of the individuals present.
I think that you had reached your conclusion by the end of the headline, and didn't need to actually read the article.
I've been following this story since before the pigs announced they were going to release footage.
Yes. In every last case. Pigs have been behaving so poorly for so long that there is no reason to do anything but mistrust them until the instant they provide incontrovertible proof. Their word is less than worthless. Anything they say without actual evidence to back it up is a fucking lie as far as I'm concerned, and anyone who defends them without available proof does so out of naivete or bad faith because they love it when pigs murder unarmed black people for them.
"Guilty until proven innocent" is the legal standard of a dictatorship, lynch mob, organized crime syndicate, or kindergartner. There is nothing of value to take away from your position.
First of all, we're talking about my personal standard for believing someone. I do not trust people who voluntarily join an institution with a long unrepentant history of racist oppression. Their word is garbage and I require actual evidence.
They chose to become cops. I don't trust them for the same reason I don't trust white supremacists. It's like trusting a babysitter wearing a NAMBLA shirt.
Understood.
Still not seeing anything of value to take away from your position, but I do understand it.
Well, look. I'm not going to become a cop just so you can value my opinion on things.
Oh, you absolutely should not be a cop.
You should go read a few history books, and maybe take a few civics classes, but you should absolutely not be a cop.
Why do you think I don't trust cops?
Because you have never had any formal training on the laws governing use of force, and your worldview is shaped by the opinions of people who have never had any formal training on the laws governing use of force. Unfortunately, with a few rare exceptions (Chris Dorner, Philando Castile spring to mind) the deceased also had no formal training on the laws governing use of force.
Dorner knew them, and committed suicide by cop. Castile knew them, followed them, and was murdered.
It is a travesty that our government only provides this training to police. It should be taught in high-school civics/social studies/government classes, so the general public is aware of when it can use force, and when force may be used on it.
Cops' "formal training" includes courses on "kill-ology". They get rewarded with paid vacation and the adoration of people like you. I've run into people like you on reddit. As long as I keep responding, you're planning to fire off one of these pro-murderpig comments every 24 hours or so to see how long you can keep me going.
As with reddit, I can choose to not participate. I'm making that choice. Inflict yourself on someone else. I'm free to leave.
This place is weirdly hyper-leftist. Don't expect this comment to go well
Leftism is when you downvote dumbass comments
This isn't a left/right issue. The divide here is between people who have learned the laws governing the use of force, and people who haven't. The problem is that the cops are in the first camp, and the people being killed (and the people outraged at them being killed) are all in the second.
The only viable solution to this problem is to broadly teach these laws to people before they decide whether to act a fool.