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.
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.