Comment by rayiner
16 days ago
This is also why the era of pervasive videotaping of everything hasn’t ended disputes over basic facts of what happened.
16 days ago
This is also why the era of pervasive videotaping of everything hasn’t ended disputes over basic facts of what happened.
I'm not sure how this intersects with the point of the paper, but part of the problem with the Renee Good case (or things like it) in my opinion is that the focus too often is on the actual events at a particular moment, and not what is surrounding it.
I can see some argument, for example, that goes something like "Jonathan Ross was afraid he was going to get hit by a car and misperceived her as trying to ram him when was trying to turn right, so he fired in self-defense." Then there's a subsequent argument about whether it was reasonable for him to think that she was going to ram him, etc.
However, what's missing from this is a broader discussion about whether or not an officer should be putting himself in that position near a car at all, when it might be anticipated that there might be misperceptions about what is happening. Whether the officer is competent enough to perceive the difference between someone turning their car versus trying to ram them (especially at that speed). Whether they should have let medical personnel help afterward.
When you frame a discussion about perceptions of facts at a particular moment, you kind of get into a frameset of thinking that everything was passively happening, and start overlooking how a particular moment came to be and whether or not the real problems are a set of things that happened minutes, days, or weeks beforehand, and what happened in the time period afterward. E.g., instead of asking "did Jonathan Ross murder Renee Good?" you can ask "were Jonathan Ross and his colleagues competent enough to avoid a situation where they might feel justified in shooting someone innocent?"
I guess I feel like this "cultural perception" question often sidesteps more important questions about whether or not what came to be could have been avoided. This gets more deeply into the underlying attitudes or assumptions driving the perceptions one way or another and lets them be addressed more directly.
We do know that it’s been a longstanding policy of DHS for officers not to stand in front of cars on purpose just so they’d have an excuse to fire upon the driver. There was an internal audit in 2014 that called out this exact behavior.
This may be related to your point, but I think another problem is that we focus on isolated events instead of applying systems thinking. Any large scale government system will result in accidental deaths. Amtrak has killed almost 600 people in the last four years. (This is not unique to Amtrak. It’s inherent in any rail system that has crossings at grade: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-train-driver-talks-about-w....) But as a society we accept that a certain number of bystanders being killed is an acceptable consequence for performance of an important government function.
Law enforcement similarly is inherently dangerous. You can enforce various standards, but fundamentally you have to pick where the set the slider bar on the scale from maximizing law enforcement effectiveness to minimizing accidental casualties.
Good pointbut we’re human so martyrs will be made.
only because half the people watching the video are spitefully ignoring the basic facts.
Yes, and now we have billionaires arguing in public about such basic facts:
X link: https://x.com/paulg/status/2008989862725341658
Screenshot: https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1q6zgq5/theres_someth...
The in-progress community notes are a shit show too.
I saw the video and saw someone trying to avoid the ICE agent, but also being EXTREMELY reckless about driving a huge SUV close to people with guns. Everyone is at fault here imo.
For reference since I'm going to assume good faith here, I recommend watching the full videos [1] from multiple angles since there's been multiple edits, cuts and potential changes done if you've seen it elsewhere or on social media. These are the unedited and unmodified videos.
[1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Gb_IkGVK7WvsTAXfMvQU...
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To me, the shooting probably wasn't justified, I don't believe that guy genuinely feared for his life, but she definitely escalated the situation by plainly trying to avoid arrest and being reckless in the process. My take of both sides doing wrong (and neither wrong canceling out the other) has gotten everybody riled up at me today. Oh well, the best I can do is go off what I see, flawed as that is.
The ICE agents WANTED to use guns, they just put themselves in a position where a seemingly trivial action by the driver could be twisted to be perceived as enough of a threat to justify pulling a gun out and shooting them multiple times in the head. Murderers with a badge.
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