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?
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.
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.
here in Canada they would be fucked and they would have had the legal duty to retreat.
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
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.
Your citizenry’s permissiveness in wild west style police justice
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.
I had no bloody clue what you meant about “people not running away fast enough”
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.
The process of justice should be secondary to the safety of citizenry
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.
Nothing ever gets better and more people will die for stupid reasons.
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.
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.