It sets those wheels in motion.
No doubt. I donāt want brakeless cops though.
Of course, youāre a good distance and a month away from the threat. It may have been less obvious if you had been there and watched a car drive directly toward your friend before turning to drive toward your other friends(and/or you) and accelerating. This is why you canāt judge peopleās actions from the perspective of someone with (possibly) 20/20 hindsight; you judge actions based on what a reasonable person(in this case, officer-with all of their prior knowledge of people doing crazy, irrational shit) would do in the situation.
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Hell, we could all do that! And it was usually a RealNews video.
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Apparently in your world, screaming ādonāt touch me.ā and running off is all that is need to prevent the organizations tasked with actual enforcement from carrying out that directive.
One that is pretty much agreed to and financed by civilized people in every functioning country.
Besides you brought Wild West justice, eh?
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No, in my world screaming ādonāt touch meā and running off shouldnāt get you shot by police. Thatās the oversimplified gist of what Iām saying, using your parlance, pardner.
If he had gotten out of the car and run, heād still be alive. When you ārun,ā using your vehicle as a weapon, you often get a reaction using weapons.
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Again, you misunderstand the basics.
When cops surround your vehicle to arrest you, as they did here, and you put your car in gear and begin to drive forward it satisfies all three conditions that must be present for lethal force to be justified, as explained above.
Ability, Opportunity and Intent.
At that point the encounter has been escalated to lethal force levels. Not because an officer was extremely likely to die in that situation, but because those actions put the officers under imminent threat of death or great bodily harm.
A police officer need not get his leg crushed by a slow-moving vehicle in that situation. A police officer need not even risk it. The officers all have a right to be blocking that vehicle as they are serving a warrant to bring a felon into custody. They do not and should not give deference to the violent whims of the person they are arresting.
Anyone who has been in a violent struggle and come out ahead repeatedly can explain how training takes over. If youāre a bouncer like I was, youāre not likely to instinctively attempt a flying armbar you saw on youtube once. Youāre going to revert to what training youāve had that youāve managed to ingrain well enough to put into action in the stressful moment. The descriptions Iāve heard from gunfight survivors seem to echo this sentiment. You revert to training.
The officers are trained to continue shooting until the threat is no more. If you shoot at the cops, the cops donāt have to stop shooting just because you turn your back and run. They need not wait for their attacker to re-group to a more favorable position and then continue the attack. They need not wait for the guy to slam it in reverse, whip a u-turn, start shooting back or any other course of action that people who escalate violence to lethal force levels can do.
Violence is unpredictable and rarely nice and neat. This is a good example of what Iād call justified conduct with plenty of room for second-guessing. It gets second-guessed precisely because people tend to look at these situations through a very narrow lens. Iāve yet to hear an anti-cop Monday morning quarterback intelligently consider the totality of the circumstances of the situation itself or the broader use of force policy and the implications their arguments might hold for that.
Again, consider the absurdity of what youāre arguing as a use of force policyā¦
āIām sorry maāam. We wanted to take your abuser into custody, but he was able to steal your car and drive away from us when we surrounded the vehicle. There was nothing we could have done to stop him without hurting someone. Iām sure you understand. I hope your son recovers swiftly from getting his hand held to a stove.ā
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To me, it looked a lot more like he was using his car as a getaway vehicle, not a weapon.
How was anyone made safer by firing on the car? It didnāt make the cops safer- they all got out of the way. Firing on the driver makes him duck and floor it regardless of whatās in front of him. If the driver gets hit they will bleed out and crash into who knows what after a initially getting away. How is that less dangerous than following the fleeing suspect in a patrol car like a ānormalā police chase?
Itās not. Itās the surviving the encounter until the guy is fleeing thatās hard.
Edit: Reread what I wrote a number of posts up. You canāt judge actions in a situation like this with the idea that those involved had the āperfectā(possibly, because you actually donāt know what the guy was going to do) knowledge you do with hindsight.
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Less dangerous for whom? If the cops donāt shoot him, there is a dangerous high speed chase. If they do shoot him, itās over. If they shoot and he he still manages to get away, youāre back to a high speed chase. So why not shoot?
If they shoot and miss, the stray bullets are a big issue, and there is a high speed chase where he may or may not crash into something. If the do not shoot, there is a high speed chase where he may or may not crash into something.
If they shoot and hit him, he speeds off, bleeds out and crashes into something.
Seems like not shooting if their life wasnāt in imminent danger would be the best option.
The high speed chase has to end at some point and what happens then? They shoot him.
What if they donāt shoot and he just circles around to try again?
Thatās silly. He just crashes into a carful of innocent, uninvolved people.
rarely.
In this situation, firing on the suspect trying to flee in his car (who is not attempting to rundown people) would seem to make the situation more dangerous for EVERYONE involved. You now have stray bullets, a driver whose natural reaction is to gas it and duck, not looking where heās driving- which is the opposite of what the cops want him to do for their own safety, a possibly mortally wounded driver who will soon pass out and crash into something(?), or a driver who just got away from the cops and sure as shit is not surrendering peacfully after being fired upon.
If he comes back around looking like he is going after people, shoot him.
He wasnāt surrendering peacefully regardless.
He looked like he was the first time. What makes shooting him the second time around any safer? You just finished coming up with a list of reasons shooting him was NOT a good option and none are solved by holding off until the second chance.
I absolutely disagree. He DID NOT look like he was trying to run anyone down, he looked like he was trying to drive around them to flee. If he doubles back or, if he had looked like he was trying to hit officers the first time around then shooting was the best option.
Right. That list of reasons shows why its a bad optionā¦ so why default to it? Its a different situation if that suspect comes back to run them downā¦ he is no longer trying to flee.
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