The ability of people on the right to throw all their principles about limited government and checks and balances and constitutional restraint out the window the second the person who got shot in their face is a political enemy is just amazing to me. You people are the ones who think we all need guns all the time to PREVENT this kind of thing, I thought!
That’s up to the agents to articulate and the investigators, prosecutors, judges, and juries to evaluate.
The fact is that law enforcement are able to legally detain people under certain conditions and those conditions do not need to be adjudicated in the moment of detainment. It can come later, and the LEOs can be held responsible if they violated someone’s rights. People on here commenting otherwise either misunderstand the law, or are intentionally providing misinformation to manipulate people and create outrage.
Which will never happen, because the suspect is a faceless (literally) body in a morgue. You're just dodging. Because, and be honest with yourself: you want this to have happened. You want your enemies to be afraid of the (again, literal) secret police wandering the streets in pursuit of your personal political goals. And if the price for that is a few unconstitutional executions, you're willing to pay it and excuse it on the internet.
But you don't really believe this was legitimate law enforcement behavior. No one does. Real civil societies don't accept summary executions of probably-asshole probably-protesters who probably-obstruct visa check operations.
If you don’t like the way the law works, do something to change it, don’t just pontificate on the internet because you are upset.
I’ve explained elsewhere on this HN thread what I observed from the videos we have all seen by now and why I think it will be difficult to waive the qualified immunity of the officer to pursue criminal charges against him. This particular spur of the thread is about whether or not law enforcement can detain people. They have the force and capability to detain, and they have case law that allows it.
Operating manuals state that officers cannot use deadly force to stop a vehicle, even if the vehicle itself is used as a weapon, if they can get out of its way instead.
This is clearly a case of an untrained, unhinged, far-right militant, itching for an opportunity to fire and kill a “fucking bitch” (seems ICE is leaving the indefensible idiot out to dry, and prepared the ground by releasing the video from the murderer’s phone).
It’s a hate crime, pure and simple.
You want to live in a world where your enemies are afraid of gestapo-like goon squads who will shoot them in the face if they do the wrong thing. You think they deserve it, that the work of the goons is important and worth some violence to enable, and surely that such violence would never be used inappropriately.
Just be clear in your own mind what you're cheering for. It's not new. Historically this never ends at plausibly-justified-minutiae about law enforcement practice.