Comment by Forgeties79 5 days ago
> Police messed up and someone got killed.
ICE, a federal agency and not a state or municipal police force, had a man face down and unarmed. There were what, half a dozen of them? He was completely subdued. They then shot him in the back.
This was not a “mistake.” This was murder.
He was face down on the ground and they already pulled his gun off him. They clearly do this regardless of which angle you’ve seen. He was not a threat.
I am actually pretty understanding of the pressures that LEO’s face and how unless I actually experience it I can’t fully get it, despite my political leanings. But that video was truly something to behold and I regret seeing it frankly.
This wasn’t a warzone. This was a bunch of “trained” federal agents subduing one person and then deciding to kill him. Blame poor training, blame poor judgment, it doesn’t matter. If this is what we are to expect in a situation like that, then ICE needs to withdraw and be held accountable.
All of this in the name of enforcing borders with our southern neighbors…in Minnesota? Which definitely bears mentioning, because clearly ICE was sent there to retaliate against Walz and not actually as some sort of legitimate effort to deal with illegal border crossings. The insult to injury of all this is this man died ultimately because Trump wanted to sent Walz a message.
> and then deciding to kill him
This is the key disagreement. Making this statement requires mind reading and it isn’t something we can assert one way or the other. We can only look at the evidence and make a guess.
For me, when I assess situations like this, I try to find an explanation that doesn’t require anyone to be cartoonishly evil, since very few people are actually cartoonishly evil in practice. In this case, similar to aviation incidents, there are two cascading failures, neither of which in isolation would have resulted in death, but both of which together did.
Speaking of aviation, it would probably help if there was an NTSB style agency for police killings. If there was an analysis of that type presented publicly I think it could make people feel better.
> This is the key disagreement. Making this statement requires mind reading and it isn’t something we can assert one way or the other. We can only look at the evidence and make a guess.
They shot an unarmed, subdued civilian in the back multiple times while he was facedown. What mind reading is necessary here?
Mind reading intent, of course.
People do foolish things when they panic. And the question is panicked mistake vs intentional murder.
My mind does anchor on things that feel too low probability to be a coincidence. The very odd “gun gun gun” shout immediately before the shooting, which very clearly could induce panic, is just a coincidence and had nothing to do with the shooting? And instead they just maniacally decided to kill him, coincidentally immediately after hearing “gun gun gun”.
Like it seems like this structure does not cause your brain to prioritize “gun gun gun” as a likely explanation. Do we just have different mental heuristics? Like I wouldn’t say that this is proof, just that it is my default explanation and that I need reasonably strong evidence to end up with a different default. I wonder what causes you to end up with the other default?
The reason I think it was a mistake is that the shooting happened right after one of the agents yelled “gun gun gun”. I am not involved in law enforcement, but as far as I know that is typically yelled when a person is threatening with a gun, not when they’ve been disarmed. Then when the agent(s) hear “gun gun gun” they panic and start shooting.
The way ICE was engaging initially did appear unreasonably hostile from the context that I saw, though the videos I saw did not appear to contain the entire engagement. Also police should be trained well enough to not panic in that situation, ideally. But it really doesn’t seem as simple as “random street execution” based on what I’ve seen.