The FBI has released video of the Finicum shooting in Oregon. We’ve been hearing competing stories about it: some have said that he was kneeling in surrender, his arms raised above his head, when the FBI gunned him down in cold blood. Others have said he was charging the police like Rooster Cogburn at the end of True Grit, demanding a hero’s death.
The video shows why both stories are going around. Finicum’s car crashes into the snow at a roadblock. He jumps out, arms held up, and runs away from the road, as if he thinks he can escape. But he’s surrounded. There are agents all around. He stops. He turns around. He lowers his arms and fumbles at his belt. Someone shoots, and he falls to the ground. The camera pans around (it’s on a helicopter or drone, and there is no sound), and you see a few brief flashes of gunfire and smoke — I can’t tell whether the occupants of the car are firing or being shot at. Then there is a few minutes of agents standing around, not ducking for cover, before the occupants begin to emerge with their hands up. Finicum’s body is lying in the snow, not moving.
So it’s a little of all of the stories. I think Finicum was in the heat of anger, ran out with the idea of escaping somehow, saw it was hopeless, and fumbled for a gun. I’d rather the law exercised more restraint — I could imagine that if he did pull a gun, he’d have waved it around in futile bravado before dropping it as the hopelessness of his situation sunk in — but I wasn’t there, and I can sympathize with the officers not wanting to risk getting shot at.
What a waste.
After Finicum was shot, you can see weird fireballs a few times near the car. The police say they fired concussion grenades to disorient the occupants of the vehicle, and they also fired beanbags. They weren’t firing ammo into the car. Another point is that Finicum was trying to reach into his pocket when they fired; in fact, there was a gun in his pocket, so they weren’t overreacting.
Bearing in mind that he had gone on record as publicly saying that he planned to go down shooting, and that every officer present knew that, and also knew exactly who he was , I’d be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt if I was on the jury.
In this particular situation, him going into his pockets for a gun was the most likely scenario. While these kinds of people may not be much on gun safety, they are most likely highly adept at the actual shooting of them. So waiting would have put everybody at far greater risk. I was not there and the video is not as clear as we’d like, but it seems to me that this was suicide by cop.
He saw the situation he was in and was reaching for his belt so he wouldn’t soil his underwear.
I was hoping that this whole clusterfuck would end without anyone being killed, but with a bunch of people serving long prison terms. However (and I can’t believe that I’m giving this much support to the cops) Finicum publicly stated that he would die before going to prison. The cops knew that this guy was a danger and I can’t fault them for shooting him when he made a move for his gun.
I wish he was subdued with some sort of nonlethal method.
He died doing what he loved.
I disagree with the first part of this statement, and would put the latter part in even stronger terms. When someone’s going so far as to pull a gun on you in a situation like that, you have to assume that they plan on using it. If you don’t shoot, you’re putting yourself at risk and the other officers around you. And if those officers had families, they had to think about them, as well. Would you risk other people’s lives, and risk making your wife a widow and your children fatherless on the slim chance an armed thug might have waved around his gun instead of shooting it?
Given some of the things Finkum has said earlier about being willing to die before having to live out the rest of his days in a concrete box, this may have been the end he desired. And given some of the things Cliven Bundy has said, this may have actually been sold to him as a martyr’s death by other militants.
In that situation with all they knew, if they had not shot him it would have been a clear case of discrimination.
lff
Xpost from Mano Singham
A few are already accusing the cops of murder and defending LaVoy Finicum. Not buying it.
IMO he was also a highly irresponsible parent. He has 11 kids and 19 grandchildren. All of whom will be able to watch dad try to shoot it out with the cops forever on YouTube and get killed himself. While trying to steal a…National Wildlife Refuge from…the US people (a cause which makes no sense).
mkoormtbaalt
Indeed. What is it in american culture that says that if you shoot someone, it must be fatal? Shoot the fucker in the fucking leg…he didn’t even had his gun out yet, and those two officers were close enough to subdue and restrain him quickly once he was on the ground.
Law enforcement are trained to shoot when the 3 M’s are present: motivation, means and motion.
The result was unfortunately predictable.
Will be interesting to see all the assholes who support shooting any black person who stands there on account of potential threat now say that the cops murdered this guy in cold blood.
Finicum himself said “you don’t point guns unless you’re serious” – Everything we knew about him indicated that if he had a gun out he might well use it. That doesn’t make this less tragic, but it does mean the officers on scene had reason to not want him with a gun in his hands.
As to 12@ Dreaming – my understanding is that it’s generally pretty hard to reliably hit limbs (and leg shots can be fatal too – there are some big arteries there), and cops are told they should only shoot in life-threatening situation, where the object is to incapacitate a quickly as possible. That means shooting for the largest target where it’ll do the most damage. A person with an injured leg can still fire a gun, and if they’re on the ground clutching their leg, it’s harder to see what they’re doing, and whether they’re reaching for a gun.
I get what you mean, but I think the problem is more the weapons and tactics used, rather than where the weapon is pointed. I could see a case being made for shields being the primary tool for confrontation, rather than guns, for example.
This is not a feasible option. Once the cops started shooting at all, Finicum would’ve assumed that he was going to die, and likely decided to try to take a few people with him. And ‘shoot him in the leg’ is a Hollywood fiction; virtually everyone trained in law enforcement is told that if you pull the trigger, you should be aiming for ‘center mass’–the torso, in part because they don’t want to miss and give the person a chance to return fire while completely uninjured. Note that they also don’t target the head–this would be even more fatal than a torso-shot, but also more likely to miss. It’s about making sure the bullet strikes the target, not about wanting a certainty of a kill. One can argue that the cops should’ve had the non-lethal options (beanbag shotguns and suppression grenades) ready from the get-go.
Please listen to yourselves. The officers did not *know* he was going for a gun, even though they say that they conveniently found a gun on him later. We would never say these kinds of things about a person fatally shot by law enforcement had the victim not been white, had he not been a gun fondler, or had he not been a right-wing kook and criminal. Yet again, as they are wont to do, officers preemptively shot and killed someone whom they should have been prepared and able to subdue nonlethally; the fact that in this case their victim was someone whom we loathed and who might have actually been dangerous should not prompt us to make excuses for them.
Yeah, here’s a guy who writes weird-ass wish-fulfillment novels about killing federal agents, launches an armed insurrection, talks about killing federal agents IRL and makes it known that he’d rather go down shooting. Not that police brutality isn’t a problem, but if I were the arresting officer, and that guy’s hands went anywhere near where he might have a gun, I’d pull the trigger, too.
Friendly:
Oh god. Yeah, we might not say it if the victim wasn’t white. Because we know cops are disproportionately harsh and violent towards non-white offenders.
Yeah, we might not say it if the victim wasn’t a gun fondler. Because then it wouldn’t be likely that he was about to pull out a fucking gun. (Most of the black victims of police violence that have drawn outrage have been completely unarmed. And were not showing any signs of being a real threat to the officers’ lives. And were certainly not part of an armed gang that had seized government property. That’s kind of fucking important. Those are not trivial details)
And no, we certainly would be outraged if police were just shooting people for being right-wing or for being criminals. But the fact that part of their crime involved them being armed, and part of their right-wing ideology and crime involved violently lashing at the government….again, those are relevant details. This wasn’t Teabagger Occupy Wall Street. This wasn’t a bunch of ex-cons getting shot down because they were being suspicious. This was a person from a group that was known to be armed and dangerous, who was reaching for what was likely to be a weapon after getting cornered. Your attempt here is to imply that accepting that it was likely necessary for the safety of the police in this situation is inconsistent with being outraged over the cases where clearly unarmed young black men were brutalized and killed. It isn’t. And the argument itself is rather repugnant.
Of course they shot him. They have no training in deescalation, nor the inclination.
Dreaming @12
That’s not remotely how they’re trained to use guns. Any time you fire a gun, you have to assume that the shot will be deadly. You might miss and ricochet, you might hit a major artery, he might move and make you hit somewhere more vital, etc. Legs aren’t easy to hit – what if you miss, and give him the opening to draw and fire? As such, you aim center of mass, increasing the chance of hitting and neutralizing him as a threat.
I absolutely believe that a nonlethal arrest would be the ideal outcome out of any situation like this. But when you have someone who A. Had a gun. B. Announced that he intends to use the gun if he ever got cornered, and C. Was actively reaching for where said gun was stored, I’d shoot too.
I pretty much agree with PZ’s take in the OP.
As regards police restraint, I’d say this is a case of tough cases making bad precedents. I’m the first to say (as someone with actual law enforcement training) that law enforcement training makes shootings MORE likely. That in fact it’s a wonder there aren’t way more shootings than there are. The training is practically DESIGNED to get people shot. (I could comment in detail, but don’t want to be tedious here.)
This case, however, is not a good example of that; it’s a case where LEO training almost makes sense. If you know in advance that the person is armed (which in this case, they have more than probable cause to believe), and if you already know the person (or let’s say, “at least one person in the vehicle”) has publicly announced that he will die rather than go to jail, and if you already know that several people in the group have announced their intentions to spill their blood for freedom, kill the oppressor, etc., etc., then you are more than reasonable to interpret any movement toward the waistline as threatening.
They still could have shown more restraint, given they had overwhelming force and (unless they’re stupid) were wearing body armor. Nevertheless, this was about as borderline as a situation can be.
One grudge I have with assholes like this is that they become the justification for treating a routine traffic stop of a random African American bank teller the same way they treat a roadblock stop of armed occupiers who have stated their intention to use deadly force on video.
The argument that law enforcement should never, ever use lethal force when they don’t have to (and I see no evidence that they “had to” in this case); the argument that this is yet another instance in a consistent American law enforcement pattern of employing deadly violence when it should not have been necessary (regardless of the extenuating circumstances and justifications that people seem eager to employ); the argument that we should not be breathing a collective sigh of relief that the feds were only “forced” to gun down one of those nasty evil people in the snow (when, in any other context, the commentariat here would be cursing “the piggies”) — that argument is “repugnant”?
Wow. Time for a Dramamine. The hypocrisy is making me nauseous.
Avenger, @22
That pretty succinctly sums up my feelings on the matter. While I’m absolutely opposed to using deadly force as the normal response, even in situations like this (there was what, 3-4 cops? even if they were firing paintballs or BB pellets, you’d go down under that weight of fire), I do think there’s a difference in context between shooting a known gun-fondler that fantasized openly about shooting cops and not being taken without a fight, and the absolutely disgusting occurrence of police shooting unarmed black teenagers going on snack runs.
As a Brit, I’m in favour of non-lethal, de-escalating policing, but even in the UK when a person of interest is known to have a gun and expressed a willingness to use it then the police will have fire-arms officers on the scene because it’s irresponsible to give someone the chance to shoot unarmed cops or civilians. When the guy is clearly changing his mind about having his hands up and is trying to pull something out of his pocket while he is covered by multiple guns, then shooting him first is not the worst option I could imagine.
Maybe the two police nearest him could have dropped their guns, drawn their batons and rushed him to the ground before he’d finished messing around with his pocket or zip or whatever was slowing him down, but in a foot or so of snow with a dozen or so feet of separation I wouldn’t have liked to bet my life or any of my colleagues’ lives on the outcome.
Saying that, seeing Finicum lying in the snow like a dropped doll saddens and sickens me, and I wish it could have gone down differently. I just don’t see how it could have with Finicum being the kind of guy he was.
Seems to me the police were fully justified in their actions given the situation that unfolded. While the video is not crystal clear, it does seem from the video that he put his hands down around his waist / jacket. He probably panicked and went with his instinct to grab his gun. Fatal mistake. I don’t think it was anything as noble as suicide by cop. He was trying to run away.
No, Friendly, your argument of “hypocrisy” is repugnant. Because it is making an equivalence between all of the fucking cases where police have gunned down unarmed black men, and between this case, which is not at all like any of them.
You don’t need dramamine. To stop feeling dizzy, all you have to do is stop fucking spinning.
No, of course not. Not a single similarity whatsoever. I mean, in this case, the body that’s lying on the ground with bullets in it should be standing in a cell in a federal prison instead of running home to mother.
The most obvious nonlethal weapon they could have used – tazers- would have had rather dramatically reduced effectiveness due to the heavy winter clothing they were all wearing (would even have reduced the effectiveness of a beanbag somewhat). Anyone know if the nutcases were wearing body armor?
Friendly @28
Isn’t that kind of ignoring that he was an active insurrectionist openly bragging about his gun ownership and claiming that he’d go down trying to kill people if he ever got cornered, actively attempting to go for a weapon that he did, in fact, have?
Those aren’t exactly small details to brush out of the comparison to, say, an unarmed black teenager doing literally nothing but buying some soda at a corner shop.
The Evil Twin @29 Re: Tazers – Range is a significant factor, as well.
“I could imagine that if he did pull a gun, he’d have waved it around in futile bravado before dropping it as the hopelessness of his situation sunk in”
I have to disagree with you on that one. This isn’t a movie. And if you, or one of your colleagues, was the one in front of him, are you going to wait for him to actually pull the gun and see if he’s going to wave it around or start shooting? Or are you going to drop him as soon as he reaches for the gun instead of the sky?
QFFT
Yet again we seem to be arguing that cops are justified in killing someone preemptively based on what type of person the victim is, on what that person has said and done in the past, and on that person’s putative possession and supposed reach for a gun. They did not *know* that he had a gun on his person until he was dead (assuming that the gun wasn’t planted on him, although I admit that it’s extremely probable that he was in fact carrying), nor did they *know* what he might have been reaching for when they shot him. If we give cops a pass on putting *anybody* down who is not verifiably wearing or brandishing a weapon or otherwise taking action that imminently endangers the health and safety of others, then we have only ourselves to blame when, the next time, the dead El Chapo is “found with a concealed weapon,” and when the time after that someone we might feel a little less antipathy toward has “inexplicably made a move for the knife that they were later discovered to have in their pocket,” and so on.
Well, I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree, then. If someone said that they’re absolutely going to shoot me, bragged about how they always carry a gun, and then repeatedly and quickly reached into their pocket upon confronting me, I’d consider that fairly damning evidence that they intend to shoot me.
Note, by the way, my repeated statement that this is a tangibly inferior outcome to a nonviolent arrest. However, I can’t say I’d really blame the cops for bringing actual firearms, given that they’re dealing with a group that actively brags about how willing they are to kill others if confronted, nor do I think this was an unjustified use of force. Something can be justified and still an inferior response.
The shot was justified. The perp’s actions at the scene required a lethal response from the officers on the scene in order to protect their lives as well as the lives of others. The fact that he had previously issued threats against LE have no bearing here, simply his own actions.
Friendly:
Are cops ever justified to shoot anyone, ever?
Please give us that your specific situations where that situation is allowed, if any, so that we can now finally have a turn to play the part of knit-picky uberskeptical a-hole.
I guess so. My position boils down to this: The state shouldn’t be executing people, whether it’s in the death chamber or on a roadside. If an agent of the state truly *has no choice* but to kill someone to prevent them from doing immediate harm, so be it, but my opinion is that (a) the bar for judging whether harm is about to be attempted needs to be set higher than it was here (not “reasonable to believe,” not “highly probable,” but “certain”) and (b) agents of the state should not allow suspects or criminals to easily put them in a *position* in which lethal force is their only choice, especially when said agents are taking part in an operation with as much time and opportunity for planning and setup as this one had.
The whole concept of suicide by cop bothers me because it implies that cops are just trigger-happy automata. It seems to be used as a concept most widely among those who seem to think that cops are always justified in shooting people.
In the Finicum case, I suspect from what he previously said that he wasn’t out for suicide per se, but merely willing to die for the cause. There’s a difference.
Le sigh. From http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/01/oregon_standoff_video_of_lavoy.html#incart_maj-story-1 :
The audio? I am surprised the video was that good since the aircraft was probably flying at a distance just to keep the noise down! If the camera had a microphone all you would hear would be engine and the hum of the gyroscopic camera mount trying keep the image steady.
I find it interesting that Friendly has nearly managed to high jack this thread by simply ignoring certain important facts. Or perhaps there is total similarity between a Black man (who has no weapons history) running away from a cop for instance and a White guy who has been bragging about being heavily armed and threatening to kill people who jumps out of a vehicle and grabs for his waistband where is carries a gun.
I’m sure I missed something.
Friendly at 38:
a) I would very much like to know what, in your opinion, “certain” means.
b) I very much look forward to hearing your ideas on how, exactly, the agents could have avoided all possibility of force being necessary. Especially, since (as you know, having read other replies upthread) Finnicum had openly stated his desire to shoot officers and would die before going to prison. Which kind of implies that the person law enforcement wants to arrest wants to use force.
Golly, that’s tough. Hmm…could it be, “Shoot only if (a) the person is presently behaving in a threatening manner and (b) you can *actually see* their weapon”?
I accept that such a rule of engagement is not immune to false positives. I also accept that such a rule of engagement creates a potential for people to be hurt or killed before law enforcement can recognize a weapon or respond to it. I would rather live in a society in which the government might sometimes fail to keep me alive than in a society in which the government kills the innocent as frequently as ours does now.
Well, sure. When someone surrounded by police, with weapons aimed at him, suddenly breaks his surrender position and reaches quickly for something in his clothing, there are so many things he could have been going for! He might have been trying to get out his autograph book and pen, or maybe he was overcome by a burning desire to take a selfie with his cell phone.
Obviously, we can’t hear anything, but it definitely does not look like he said, “I am reaching for (innocuous item)” and reached for it very slowly so as not to present a threat.
Such as in this case. How many dead cops and civilians are required for you to consider it a “good shot”?
By then the cop, his backup, or a civilian could be shot by the person being arrested. You don’t seem overly concerned about the safety of others, especially cops.
I agree that this is the expected outcome, but I’m not inclined to just go with the FBI’s report that Finicum definitely had a gun and was definitely reaching for it when he was shot. The FBI says that whenever it’s convenient for them. Finicum acted stupidly. I’d hope this would undergo a thorough investigation before declaring that it was justified, as should all police shootings of civilians.
I’ve been watching the Bundy supporter pages to see how they react to the shooting—whether this is something more for them to rally behind or whether the murkiness around Finicum’s final actions give them some pause. It’s too early to tell now, but I’m seeing at least a few comments about how he should have complied with police instructions, etc. It gives me some hope that his death won’t be a unilateral rallying point but will be divisive, like the group’s other actions.
Finicum was reaching into his coat where he had be videoed a wearing a shoulder holster with a handgun from the assholes internet feeds during their occupation. The gun was discovered when he was searched. How it this a bad shooting?
@Friendly #38:
Jesus monkeyfuck! I can’t work out if you have difficulty correlating simple English words or if you barely have even a single foot in reality. Or perhaps you have 100% mind-reading skills and perfect precognition.
As a Brit, you should be aware that American police have shot and killed 1,000 times more people than the British police have done over this decade. Even adjusting for population size, that’s still around 200 times more often.
Granted, America being an armed society makes a big difference, but it’s clear that Finicum would have had a much better chance of surviving an armed encounter with the police had it happened in the UK.
Deescalation doesn’t require officers to take stupid risks. You keep your distance and keep talking until the situation is diffused. Failing that, non-lethal rounds are sometimes an option. Of course, there are limits, and if Finicum had drawn and started raising his gun, there would have been no option but to shoot.
Sure, given the training and ground rules American LEOs operate under, and given Finicum’s actions, the outcome was likely inevitable, I just don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that its the same training and ground rules that leads to a thousand Americans being shot and killed, many of them unarmed, long before they’re given their day in court.
There is very little similarity…unless, of course, both of these people wind up unnecessarily and unjustifiably dead at the hands of law enforcement.
They could not have avoided “all possibility of force,” but they could have, say, set up a much tighter roadblock in front of and then behind a portion of the road covered to the maximum extent by beanbag guns, net launchers, gas, and other crowd-control weapons. These are federal agents with federal resources who had a month to put something together; the most effective and creative means these agents could come up with to arrest these men and keep them alive, despite the perps’ known worst instincts, were sleeker rifles and bigger bullets?
Point taken. Nonetheless, if we approve of shooting people dead for making a break for it and/or reaching for something in their clothing, that’s exactly what shooting victims who *weren’t* captured on film will always have been doing just before “the unfortunate incident.”
None and none, but…
…this might sometimes happen, yes. Given that we adhere to strict standards of evidence-gathering and prosecution, sometimes people that everyone who has had anything to do with them knows are stone killers will walk to kill again; should we “make allowances” there as well?
I am in fact concerned about the safety of people, cops included. But if it comes to a choice between safety and freedom from even the appearance of oppression, I’ll choose the latter. No doubt I’m hopelessly naive, but I think we can and should aim for a society in which the process of justice doesn’t involve either cops or anyone who encounters them winding up dead.
Because “I was sure it was a gun! I couldn’t very well read his mind!” has never ever been used as a defense ever.
@ #47
Seriously? A guy who’s hardly ever been seen or photographed without a gun, getting out of a car that had guns in it, but you don’t believe he might have been carrying a gun?
Getting dangerously conspiracy-minded there. It would be too easy to dismiss literally any police action as some kind of skullduggery, weapon planting, or other such thing.
The counter narrative is already complete. Before the video came out, I said that it didn’t matter what it showed, the conspiracy theorists would find a way to either (a) make it fit their version of events, or (b) discredit it.
Thus, to them, the video now proves that LeVoy Finicum is a hero who gave his life to save the lives of the other occupants his truck. At the initial traffic stop, Finicum sped off when the FBI opened fire on the truck, then when he saw the road block (that had been maliciously set around a blind corner) at the last second, he was able to swerve around it, driving into a snow bank to avoid hitting the FBI officer who had leapt in front of the truck in order to shoot in through the windshield. Finally, he quickly jumped out of the truck, and put some distance between him and the truck in order to draw fire away from the other occupants to keep them safe. He was trying to surrender, his arms raised, when he was shot from behind by an FBI agent who had been waiting in the trees to ambush him. Only then did he reach down to clutch his wound whereupon the other agent opened fire and killed him.
Oh, and that video? You can buy a better camera at Best Buy for a couple of hundred bucks. And where’s the video from the agent on the ground who was only a few yards away from the shooting. Oh, and the jerkiness of the video footage proves that it was tampered with–CGI is so easy these days–and didn’t you notice that the time stamp was wrong? Must be fake…
At this point, not even Matrix-style super-slomo HD video footage would be enough to change that narrative. It has become an article of faith.
Friendly at 51:
(emphasis mine)
“Despite the perp’s known worst instincts”- which include publicly threatening to kill anyone trying to arrest him and letting everyone know he carries a gun at all times, you insist on treating the guy like he wasn’t armed and didn’t drive a pickup at speed toward a roadblock. Jesus, you’re the most obtuse person I’ve met in a while, and that’s saying something.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @ 48
I don’t know that it’s a bad shooting. Doesn’t seem to be. I’d just prefer that the justification at this point be tied to Finicum’s stupid behavior and not to the “fact” that he was for-sure armed. Right now his accomplices swear he wasn’t armed and that, if he had been, he wouldn’t be carrying a 9mm and, if he had been, he wouldn’t have kept it in either his waistband or his left coat pocket as FBI claims. It’s probably nothing, but I don’t have much faith right now in the FBI’s track record of shooting civilians because they were “reaching for their gun”.
I don’t want to see this become any murkier for people who are inclined to support him. And I def don’t want there to be any room for comparisons between LaVoy Finicum and other people (mostly POC) who were shot and later found to be unarmed.
I’m just seeing comments here and elsewhere that “he was shot because he was armed and reaching for his gun”. That video is too grainy and FBI has been known to lie about such things before.
One. More. Time: While they had every reason to *suspect* he was armed, they didn’t *know* he was armed. And besides…again….neither threatening to kill people, nor professing to carry a gun, nor actually being having a gun on one’s person, nor driving a vehicle into or around a roadblock should be considered justification for *shooting that person dead*.
So essentially what Friendly seems to be arguing is that the Fed should have done nothing at all and allowed the armed terrorists to continue with their (currently minor) insurrection. Because these people kept threatening to use guns to kill other people if they were crossed at all.
There are videos after videos of cops killing black men with no reason at all. Those videos show that clearly. What this video shows is that when the Feds finally decided to do something to stop what was/is really an armed insurrection some guy jumps out of a truck that attempted to run away for a road block a guy jumps out of that truck and does appear to be grabbing for his waistband and he was then shot. Interestingly enough no one else in that truck was injured or harmed. Hmmmm
And there you go, Rich Woods. I’ve achieved “difficulty correlating simple English words,” or something like that.
No, there’s still very little similarity. Two ludicrously dissimilar situations having the same conclusion does not make them suddenly easy to conflate.
A teenage person of color in jail for having a baggie of coke planted on him and a white mass murderer doing life for killing 10 people might both be in jail, but that doesn’t mean that their situations are suddenly comparable because they both wound up in prison.
If the FBI had a plane up doing surveillance of the guy, why did they need to intervene and get in a gunfight with him? Unless I am mistaken, they have literally forever to deal with the guy; arresting him cowboy-style invited, and got, a gunfight. Way to de-escalate, FBI!
There is a saying, and it’s true: you can’t outrun a radio.
Cops ought to be expected to not do high-speed chases in any situation where they can put a radio-net around a suspect and wait. Eventually they will have to sleep. They do not need to violently apprehend a suspect, either, if they have the ability to simply follow them and wait until they have to sleep, refuel, eat, whatever.
Cops do NOT understand de-escalation. Remember the way the FBI tried disruption and intimidation at Waco, by playing death metal and the sounds of rabbits being killed at the people in the compound? Better suggestion: “Uh, did your beer run out? Can we negotiate a way to get you some more beer if maybe you can stop waving the guns around? The beer gods disapprove. Talk to us.”
@57 So only if one has already actually shot someone, are the police justified in using deadly force? okee dokey.
@51
Cops can lie, there’s nothing that can change that, as long as we give them guns there’s going to be some sort of situation where we’re relying on their testimony and not some physical evidence. Even in this case, the video doesn’t specifically show Finicum going for his gun, or that he has one — it’s too far away and the angle is unfavorable. I think the most we can say is that what it shows is completely consistent with the FBI account, “it looked like he was going for a gun,” and the video in no way contradicts that.
If you want incontrovertible physical evidence of that all police shootings are warranted and that we have to simply discount police testimony, I’m not sure that’s a realistic standard. A lot of the justification in a police shooting depends on what the policeman felt, subjectively, in the moment, and wether it was reasonable for him to feel threatened, and there’s no way you can use a videotape or forensic evidence to prove something is “reasonable.” Notwithstanding, a lot of the methods used to analyze physical evidence are utter b.s. and it just substitutes one kind of human testimony for another.
@61
So there are some practical problems- it was almost impossible to cut power or water to the buildings they were in, without sending a lineman right up to the pole near the building. The utility was a co-op the covered several counties and they just didn’t have the ability (the term I read was “isolation capacity”) to cut off the refuge without also shutting down every ranch in the vicinity, which would have cheezed-off a lot of people nearby, people who were at best tolerating the all the Feds and state police around.
Secondly you had them coming in and out of town, and people from out of town coming in and bringing more beer (and everything else). The question is, when they drive in, packing their rifles, do you have the armed confrontation as they leave? They want to come into town, they have guns; if you want to avoid escalation, you probably have to let them pass, particularly as long as most of them, and their leaders, are still safe at the refuge and can stage some sort of suicidal “last stand.” At the time I didn’t like that the occupiers could just waltz into town, either, but it’s how they decided to handle it, and I’m not sure there was a more optimal result.
it was almost impossible to cut power or water to the buildings they were in, without sending a lineman right up to the pole near the building.
How would cutting their power and water benefit “de-escalation”??? You’re thinking like a totalitarian FBI cop, right there. Does your idea of “de-escalation” also involve tasers and CS gas, fuckwit?
They want to come into town, they have guns; if you want to avoid escalation, you probably have to let them pass,
Lesson #1:
“Hi, look, let’s make a deal. We promise we won’t try to interfere with you at all if you need to go to town to get supplies. Just please don’t be waving guns around, and we won’t wave guns around either and nobody gets hurt. We want to make sure nobody gets hurt, so of course we have no problem with you going to town .. hey do you remember that Johnny Cash song ‘don’t take your guns to town’? That’s what we’re talking about… And you’ll realize we’re not here to kill you and nobody has to die today or tomorrow or even next week, OK?”
Wow, an argument I hate both sides of. Guess it’s time for me to bow out.
The tiresome Friendly
They didn’t need to justify *shooting him dead*. All they need to do is justify *subduing a probable threat*. All of the previous factors, such as his actions and words stating his intent to harm, legitimize such subduing. Now run along and play your broken record elsewhere.
@65
I quote Ammon Bundy: “These guns are what are keeping things peaceful.” In their ideology, keeping their guns with them at all times was completely non-negotiable, as far as they were concerned, their guns were actually preventing violence and their guns were actually making the town safer. Any effort to prevent them from bringing their guns would be an escalation.
Even if you made this request of them in a negotiation, how would you realistically enforce their side of the bargain, when any sort of punitive measure will be an escalation?
That is, of course, not what I’m arguing, essentially or otherwise. I’m glad that federal agents finally acted against the militia and I’m glad that so many of the militia members surrendered or left the premises without being killed. My only beef is that the feds could have and should have been able to avoid shooting down Finicum in the way that they did.
I want the U.S. to move into a cultural space in which variants of the word “police” aren’t so often followed by variants of the word “shoot,” followed shortly thereafter by variants of the word “die.”
But thank you for a very fair and well-thought comment!
That’s a nice, chilling, depersonalizing way to frame it.
I suspect that the difficulty might be with some members of the audience rather than with the record, but I agree that it won’t be useful for me to comment any further in this thread.
I am sad that we can not figure any other way to deal with situations like this one but shoot to kill. From what I see that is always the fall back “safest” most reliable way to deal with it thinking of the safety of the most people and any legal ramifications, but that is the way we roll. It is disappointing that we will not be treated with the comic-drama of a public trial I can think of others that it would have been entertaining to see put on trial that had a very similar end.
I am not so sure in these high-tech days of the ubiquity of laser sights and high-powered telescopic sights that it had to go this way. This was not after all a random stop at all they knew who they were after and where they were the whole time if not they should have.
Even so it does make me sad that we still can’t seem to figure out any other to arrest or stop people besides shoot to kill or threaten to.
uncle frogy.
@ #65
Given that scenario, how would you see the situation ending? They had stated unequivocally, that they were there until the lands were turned over to private ownership, that they were going to open the preserve to cattle grazing in the spring, and they were calling on other supporters to join them, to the extent that supporters should “kill anyone who tries to stop you.” Under your de-escalation policy, what result would you envision?
@69
I think everybody wants that, but I’m not following how this relates to the death of LaVoy Finicum.
@ #70
They did manage to arrest a fair number of heavily armed people without killing them, though they may have threatened to.
Ok, I watched the video, and I’m with Friendly. The agents did not need to shoot Finicum.
There was plenty of cover and space to let him run or show intent to fire without putting the agents at risk. If they know dealt force was possible, why did they approach in the open so close so quickly?
There was an aerial drone which could track him if he ran until he could be apprehended.
He was in the middle of nowhere in “friendly” country, there was no reason to believe that civilians would be at risk.
And additionally, no medical assistance was provided in a timely fashion. There should have been paramedic units nearby if the threat of deadly force was significant (as it was).
I’m sure the agents were afraid he was going to shoot, but they are there to not just apprehend but protect even terrorist, traitorous assholes. They need to deal with their fear rationally.
@70
Thought Experiment: What if someone finally invented the Phaser, Set For Stun. You could sweep an entire area, rendering people perfectly unconscious for 10-20 minutes, it would be absolutely guaranteed that no one would have any lasting permanent damage. That would definitely be better for the police and people they were trying to arrest.
But what about freedom more generally? What happens when the police stun you for talking back to them, being in a protest. You go to court and you say you were injured, but in fact you really weren’t, all they did was do the biological equivalent of putting you on hold for a few minutes while they made the situation “safer.”
The violence the police use from time to time isn’t the basic problem; the basic problem is when they exceed the authority we give them, violently or otherwise. It doesn’t kill anyone to snoop your email.
Being armed and not getting on your knees and putting your hands behind your head is stupid behavior. He should have been presumed armed and dangerous based in intel.
He was no angel.
[And according to the same people who supported Finicum, that totally justifies getting shot by police.]
Given that scenario, how would you see the situation ending?
Ideally, in boredom.
They had stated unequivocally, that they were there until the lands were turned over to private ownership, that they were going to open the preserve to cattle grazing in the sprin..
So, one of the first things not to do when trying to de-escalate is to assume (as your negotiating partner does) that their perception of the options in the situation is the only set of options available. One way to help your partner de-escalate is to get them to realize this; they may adopt alternative paths that don’t end in violence. A simple form is, “Um, you’re here because you want to graze your cattle? How does violence accomplish that? You can’t care for your cattle if you’re in an armed standoff talking about how willing to die you are…”
What the FBI and several commenters on this thread are doing is adopting either the Bundy or the FBI frame – both of which escalate rather than de-escalate. That’s not how to do it.
“Look, you can’t graze here and if you want to stand armed guard over your cows we’re not going to gunfight you, but that’s simply impractical. You can keep doing this stuff and all you’re doing is racking up a big tab. In case you hadn’t noticed you’ve marooned yourself in the middle of nowhere and signing up to live out here indefinitely is going to just make us all miserable.”
Sun Tzu rightly says you need to defeat your opponent’s strategy. Meeting their threats with more threats is playing into it.
I’d say get them to understand that its very easy to make it impossible for them to graze their cattle there, and there’s nobody for them to go on the offensive against. Then see what THEIR Plan B is.
thought experiments are useful only in the abstract there is seldom any useful outcome in pursuing them.
why even go there unless to distract from the concrete here and now.
The simple point I am making is that the emphasis is not on capture but on some thing else like confrontation with the threat of imminent death. The ease that the people of interest become “perps” instead of citizens with rights and responsibilities is breathtaking.
uncle frogy
No, the FBI is not required to protect the terrorists. In fact, their job is to stop them, which they did. If the fool had simply remained in the vehicle like everyone else, he too would have been arrested and currently be in jail.
Thought Experiment: What if someone finally invented the Phaser, Set For Stun. You could sweep an entire area, rendering people perfectly unconscious for 10-20 minutes, it would be absolutely guaranteed that no one would have any lasting permanent damage.
Sam Harris is that you?
Seriously, this is a practical problem in strategy, not a bullshit thought experiment involving Science Fiction.
Yeah, and at the next attempt to apprehend him he runs again, ad infinitum.
If you let someone go anytime they refuse to be apprehended, then you can never apprehend anyone. At some point you have to take the person into custody whether they like it or not. Say, by using a roadblock and armed officers.
I’m not going to chime in on either side of this debate. I just want to point out that posting this:
(Ronald Couch #58)
forty minutes after this:
(Friendly #51)
is not contributing to the conversation. If it’s really so hard to counter Friendly’s arguments that you can only resort to mocking your own caricatures of them, it looks to me like you’ve conceded.
To quote the ammosexuals: the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
If you let someone go anytime they refuse to be apprehended, then you can never apprehend anyone.
They’d get pretty tired of that, I imagine. And you can’t get much enjoyment from a life spent running from drones. “Why don’t you meet us at the Starbucks over there and we can talk about how to end this peacefully? Because our guys who fly the drones are enjoying this way too much and you look pretty tired and sleep deprived.”
No, the basic problem is that the police have been given far too much latitude in their authority to shoot suspects. As I pointed out in a previous comment, US police shoot and kill people around 200 times more often than UK police (per capita). Now, the US is a heavily armed society, but gun crime is not that rare in the UK, and now way does it account for the 20,000% difference.
Here is a good analysis of one part of the problem:
How many agents must Finicum shoot with his handgun before you say otherwise?
Finicum always had the opporutnity to get on his knees, and put his hands behind his head, until he reached for his gun. You don’t mention that….Thanks for playing, but you have nothing cogent to offer if you miss that MAJOR fact.
@87 yes and the feds could have been behind their vehicles and armed with laser sighted rifles they could have done a lot of things differently but did not they went with armed confrontation a face off with a predictable outcome.
Why was that the best or even a good choice?
uncle frogy
For purposes of educating those talking about how to deescalate, there are the two types of suicide by cops:
Sounds like Finicum, and what can really be done in these situations, other than letting them get away to terrorize/commit more crimes another day?
Finicum didn’t sound suicidal. But this is the one that brings a lot of criticism of law enforcement, and no doubt needs some work by law enforcement to deescalate. Not sure how, not my area of expertise.
I’m a criminal defense attorney. I represent really bad people I’d represent these guys if they hired me. Simply because I represent people accused of crimes does not mean I condone their behavior. These guys were heavily armed. They took over and vandalized public property. They threatened and placed innocent people in fear every day they were in that town. I watched the FBI video and the FBI followed that truck for about 15-20 minutes. It stopped several times and it appeared that the agents were waiting to see whether the occupants would surrender. They didn’t. Finicum drove his car off of the road and almost ran down one of the agents. Funicum ran out of the car and wasn’t shot. It wasn’t until he looked like he was drawing a weapon that agents shot him. They showed a shit ton more restraint for this asshole than other cops had shown for unarmed black children. It’s never good when people are killed. This guy brought it on himself. If he had surrendered he’d be alive. If you act like your drawing a weapon, if police have good reason to believe you be a danger, your going to get shot dead if you do what finicum did. The other people surrenedered and weren’t shot, beaten, or otherwise abused. These agents used restraint, finicum acted like a fucking idiot. He knew he’d get shot if he acted the way he did. He acted the way he did and he got shot. I’m a huge critic of the police. I spend a lot of time trying to rip their actions and stories apart. Video is usually the hardest thing to dispute. These agents’ actions look very justified.
Finicum drove a long way to get into this mess, stayed for a month in a situation that he knew was illegal, bragged repeatedly that he wasn’t going to follow rules, stated many times that he was going to kill or die rather than surrender, saying so as publicly as is humanly possible, and then he drove away after being stopped, driving so frantically as to lose control of his vehicle. But sure, he may have been going to surrender peacefully.
The time to surrender peacefully was last month, at his home. Which several of his compatriots did indeed do.
Right, but “citizenship” and “rights” are abstractions too. You’re also positing here a hypothetical where “capture” is a viable alternative to “confrontation with the threat of imminent death”, which may only be true in some cases.
I agree that it’s disgusting for people to flippantly cheer someone’s death, no matter how it happened, but the mere fact that people do, the “ease that people of interest” become dehumanized “perps,” is after the fact and does not itself delegitimize any use of force. Just because you dehumanize a person, that doesn’t actually mean that you’ve lost your right to protect yourself from him. A “perp” is a cultural construction, his gun is not.
@84
I think we should hold the police to a higher standard than ammosexuals, just because people we despise are barbaric, we can’t ourselves return the barbarity tit for tat. Unless everything is just revenge and we’re like the prison warden in A Clockwork Orange: “the criminal pushes society, so society should push back.”
@86
I agree, but in this “concrete instance” did the police exceed their latitude? I don’t think so. That should be the point of contention, everyone may concede that his death was a terrible thing — worse, a terrible thing done in our name — but did the police do anything that we wouldn’t expect them to do?
Lordie, I hate monday morning quarterbacks.
I don’t know about that. This guy did everything he could to indicate that he’d keep it up forever and wouldn’t submit peacefully. Maybe he was full of crap. Or maybe it goes on for years with taxpayer costs running into the hundreds of millions.
At any rate, law enforcement cannot be expected to have infinite patience and spend infinite resources tracking someone for whom they have warrants just because the guy won’t cooperate. That’s a recipe for lawlessness. At some point you make a decision to take the person into custody, and you follow through on it. If he intends to submit peacefully, there’s his chance.
Friendly @wherever
Yes, we’re all well aware of your need to be self-righteous and your desire to lord it over people you disagree with. That much was clear. What isn’t clear is whether you’ll stick the flounce. I hope you do.
@ #78 Marcus Ranum
They made it very clear what their Plan B was. Same as plan A. Stay where they were with all their guns, knock down the fences, allow cattle to graze the preserve, convince more supporters to join them, become de facto owners of the land until they could turn it over to locals. The idea that you would talk them out of it, while making their life as easy as possible, is beyond wishful thinking.
Repeating what others have said:
To Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia and others
This is grossly informed and dangerous advice.
One: Leg shots can totally be lethal. If you hit the femoral artery, you’re going to bleed out quite quickly without very quick and experienced first aid, plus a very quick visit to a hospital. Depending on the severity of the wound, even with proper first aid, you can bleed out and die in 3 minutes. You are a dangerous fool for saying that they should shoot someone in the leg on the assumption it won’t kill. Please don’t give advice about dangerous weapons and medicine when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Two: If the leg shot is not lethal, then the other person still has a chance to shoot back. Guns are not Star Trek “set to stun” phasers. Getting shot in the leg doesn’t stop you from acting and shooting a gun in your hand. You’re asking the police to give this guy additional opportunity to shoot the police. That’s wholly unreasonable IMO.
Further, legs are smaller targets than torso. They’re harder shots. Asking the police to shoot at a smaller target means a higher chance of missing, which again means you’re asking the police to put themselves into IMO unreasonable amounts of unjustified danger.
This is why police will shoot many times. They don’t know if they’ve hit. Further, not all hits are immediately and magically incapacitating. That’s why they shoot multiple times. The only time that they should be shooting is in justified self defense scenarios (possibly while enacting arrest), and in justified self defense scenarios, incapacitation is the method of self defense. I have disdain for people who ignorantly complain that the police only needed to shoot once or twice, not 10 times, because the complainers don’t understand a damn thing.
…
To A Masked Avenger
I think you don’t know much about body armor.
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-soldiers-wear-a-totally-bullet-proof-suit-which-would-cover-from-head-to-feet
This is not Hollywood fantasy. You cannot actually make a suit of armor that resists rifle rounds like in Hollywood Batman films.
So like my complaints above, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re giving incredibly foolish and dangerous advice.
…
To Friendly
I’m incredibly sympathetic to your position, but not enough to actually agree. I am quite vocal about putting severe restrictions on the use of force by police.
However, if someone is a known outstanding felon, known to carry guns, and meets a technical definition of “armed and dangerous”, then I totally ok with current police procedure: They will yell “you are under arrest, raise your hands” and have guns pointed at the “suspect”. I am totally ok with police shooting at the chest of any such suspect who makes any motion that might be going for a gun. This is no more than what I would afford to anyone else in a self defense situation. That’s what the shooting is – justified self defense.
Maybe there were other tactics open to avoid placing themselves in a situation where their choices are justified self defense or unreasonably risk their own death, but I’m having a hard time imagining such tactics. Maybe approach in tanks, and announce over a loudspeaker that they need to strip naked in order to ensure that they are not armed, and only then police leave their tanks and put on handcuffs. Would you be ok with those tactics? What if they just try to run through the woods where the tanks cannot follow? Have the helicopter follow? What then? Eventually, if someone is adamant on using threats of force to escape, you will reach a situation where you need to go out on foot to enact arrest, which puts us right back at square one, where the police are on foot and they need to shoot the guy when he reaches for a gun. I wish we lived on a world where we had “set to stun” Star Trek phasers, but we don’t, and I’d rather shoot people than let people escape all law enforcement when the people threaten the use of deadly force against police over an extended period of time in order to resist arrest.
I’d really like to know how. I’ve called many others in this thread ridiculously naive, and I have to apply that label to you as well.
You have to take the world as it is, not as you wish it would be, when evaluating the effectiveness of plans to change the world for the better.
…
To Marcus Ranum in post 61.
Sadly, I’ll have to disagree with you here. The specific tactics that you describe are unworkable, cost-wise, and effective-ness wise. I think you’re going far overboard.
One thing is, while it’s possible to imagine a scenario where he pulled out a cell phone or his driver’s license, it’s frankly also possible to imagine a scenario where he pulled out something considerably more destructive than a firearm. There are small things in this world that make big booms. The officers would have been well aware of this possibility.
He had his hands up. He was listening and understanding directions, and was surrendering at gunpoint. He then un-surrendered. And while there’s no sound, the officer still waited long enough to have shouted a warning before firing. In this case, given the entire situation, I wouldn’t expect or require officers to have exercised any more restraint.
@87
Did you miss the part where I said that they should hold back and stay under cover, rather than approach? I don’t want anyone to get hurt. After a chase where Finicum and his buddies have been hyping each other up, giving him some space while keeping cover and talking him down seems reasonable.
People do stupid stuff, especially hopped up on adrenaline. He had the chance, but a few seconds isn’t a real chance. I’m glad you pro shooting people want to live in Judge Dredd land, but I want to live in a place where law enforcement’s job is to put themselves at risk to bring people to face justice (not that our justice system is great shakes, but better than summary execution).
I wanted the shooting to be clearly justified. My first reaction to his death was “good, I’m sure he deserved it and it was clearly justified.” I’m just disappointed that it went down in an ambiguous way, where a (shitty, stupid) person ended up dead.
I plan to still have extremely high standards for law enforcement. “He should have to ground instantly” ” he was reaching waistband” *when law enforcement had room to safely retreat without putting civilians at risk* ring just as hollow here as in the Tamir Rice case. They took a month to get to this point. They could afford to spend a few more hours trying to catch a guy. I like the run forever scenario. How long can he go in the middle of nowhere in the bitter cold?
Anybody want to justify leaving him bleeding in the snow?
If Finicum had actually drawn his gun all the way before he was shot, Friendly would no doubt be arguing that the officers didn’t KNOW it was loaded and didn’t KNOW it was a real gun, and were therefore still in the wrong.
I wonder if Friendly applies this standard to self-defense.
What cover? Their cars!? Please. Or would you prefer that they brought actual tanks?
Ok, so in your world, you want the police to bring tanks to every potential arrest where the person might be armed. Is that your position?
And then what if he runs through the woods? Sure, I agree, that’s a stupid decision, but this person has already made a rash of stupid decisions. I bet you want to have the helicopter remain there for hours just to keep track of the guy. I suspect the helicopter’s fuel is going to run out, so that plan won’t work. Further, do you know how much operating that helicopter costs!? Sorry, there is a limit on how much money I’m willing to spend to try to keep fools alive who make explicit threats of violence to resist arrest for many minutes on end, which is precisely what happened here with the initial stop, the getaway, the second “stop”, and running out of the car.
Serious question: Did you even watch the video? I did.
I get the impression that none of you read the statement the FBI gave the press.
Because according to that statement, he wasn’t shot by FBI agents. He was shot by Oregon State Troopers.
I can’t tell how important that difference is, but I expect those troopers have different training from an agent.
zardeenah
Have you read the report at the link? He was sitting in a stopped vehicle for several minutes while others were being arrested. He then tried to flee by vehicle, nearly ran over an officer avoiding the roadblock, crashed into a snowbank, and then spent his last few minutes ignoring orders to get on the ground. quite a bit more than a few seconds, and the other people in the vehicle are all still alive.
This is a never ending argument. I will never make anyone who feels he deserved to die change their minds.
I know you are all arguing in good faith… And I will admit it was a difficult situation. But I’m still going to hold law enforcement to an incredibly high standard. I hope we can at least all agree that the team on the ground should be asking themselves all these questions and more, so they can bring the next guy in with no loss of life, and not slapping themselves on the backs for a job well done.
Any confrontation with a death should be relentlessly interrogated, not marked as inevitable. From the video, I wouldn’t indict the officers, I just still expect more.
Tacitus @50:
Yes, that hadn’t escaped my attention. Generally, IMO, US police get too little training in de-escalation and too much of their doctrine is on confrontation. As has been said, either here or on another thread I read this morning, American police concentration on getting home alive at the end of their shift creates situations that inevitably lead to shootings and beat-downs of innocents.
In this particular case, I just can’t see it going down much differently if it had hypothetically happened in the UK. Or it would have happened a lot differently, such that there’s no meaningful comparison. Once you have the situation where a presumably armed man tries to break or bypass a road-block manned by armed police, the only way it could have happened differently is if Finicum had not been such a bloody fool. When he puts his hands down, disobeying police orders to stay still (another presumption, but everything I’ve seen as well as common sense tells me that they would have been shouting instructions at him), and starts tugging on his jacket in such a way as to give the impression that he’s going for his weapon, he would have been shot by British fire-arms officers, I think, just as he was here.
It’s not a great outcome, I’m not celebrating it, and from my first viewing of the video to the latest, I wish it would have happened differently. I’m just not going to put the blame on this death onto the police or the feds. If anyone has culpability here, it’s Finicum and his fuckwit militia friends.
On whether I’d say those things about a black victim, I’d say context matters.
First of all, there’s the racial context, which was already mentioned.
Second, there’s the fact that the victim was part of a group of people who had taken over federal property and threatened to shoot police if they tried to remove them.
Third, there’s the fact that this person in particular very carefully said everything BUT “I will shoot any cops who try to take me in” – everything he said MEANT that.
Fourth, to the degree that it’s possible to know someone is armed without seeing the weapon, they knew he was armed.
Fifth, he was actively resisting arrest, having already attempted to flee.
If all of those conditions existed, I think I would say “I don’t like it, and I think we should explore other options, but I can’t fault them for shooting this guy”, regardless of skin color.
Let’s take a different example – John Crawford. He had a weapon that looked like a “real gun”, and he was killed. In that case, the police knew nothing about him that would give them reason to think he was a threat. He was also in an open-carry state, in a store that sells firearms.
And unlike in Finicum’s case, Crawford was not given time in which he could have surrendered or explained himself. He did manage to say “it’s not real” before police opened fire.
In Crawford’s case, the police did have reason to be afraid, but didn’t bother to confirm reject their fears. They yelled at him and then opened fire basically as soon as he noticed them.
In Finicum’s case, even with everything they knew about this guy, they didn’t open fire until he had reached for something inside his jacket/pants a third time.
Again – I think that deaths in both cases could have been avoided if something like a full-sized ballistic shield was the go-to confrontational weapon for officers (along with training), but since that’s not the tool set being used by law enforcement at this time, I can’t fault them for using the tools they did have, in this manner, in this case.
Wrong. The team on the ground did the job they had to do, and given the knowledge they had, I back them totally. There was no way in hell for another result, that didn’t involved dead OSP/FBI. You won’t see that. Says something about your presuppositions.
Further to me @105: All of which is not to say that the police and the FBI shouldn’t be looking at the incident with a view to trying to avoid that outcome in future similar situations. Yes, with hindsight, they could have done things differently to avoid Finicum’s death.
But we don’t get to know every consequence even after the event, we only know what happened in this particular branch of the timelines. Maybe if that particular agent or cop hadn’t been in the path of the van when it went off the road, there would have been a tad less adrenaline in the air when Finicum left the vehicle. Maybe FInicum thought he’d killed the guy and was as good as dead already. Maybe if the cop or agent on the far left hadn’t been there (what the heck was he doing way over there, anyway?) Finicum might have felt that making a run for it would have been a better option, and the police could have caught him non-lethally. Who can know?
This police extrajudicial killing was justified by current US policing standards, but I’m surprised to see some of the same justifications for it here that have been vilified in other contexts. Do the people saying that the police had no choice not hear how that is exactly what the police have said about thousands of other people they killed?
Just follow their instructions if you don’t want to die.
The police can’t wait for the guy to shoot at them.
Stupid second guessing civilians don’t know what it’s like.
There HAD to have been a way to take this guy in WITHOUT killing him. Rubber rounds, beanbags, a fucking net, de-escalation tactics…
@107
Maybe there wasn’t another way for it to go down, but that doesn’t mean that people empowered to use deadly force on every single person within the US shouldn’t interrogate themselves *every single time* they use it.
This (in Iceland) the reaction I would like to see after a police shooting, not “fuck, yeah! The suspect is responsible for his own death and his mistakes were the only ones! No reason to question the situation! Law enforcement knows what they’re doing”
My supposition is that there is always something that can be done differently at some point in the police action that can pivot the outcome more positively (also negatively), so why not look for the places where loss of life could be avoided. I’m so sorry you feel like there was only one way it could go without dead bodies all over the place. Seems like you are just as guilty of thinking the future can be predicted as my “side” of the argument has been accused of here.
I think it’s a tragedy every time the state takes a life.
@110, this is just the kind of debrief topic I expect all the involved law enforcement officers to be discussing.
@109 Context matters. You seem to be ignoring it.
Regarding the earlier remarks about leaving Finicum “bleeding in the snow”, does anyone really expect the police to bring paramedics in *before* the truckload of armed criminals has been secured? They got the truck emptied and the people inside well in hand, then immediately started tending to Finicum – you can even see folks showing up with paramedic gear toward the end of the video.
It’s a shame a man died here, and I fully agree that US police forces need better training in deescalation tactics and more emphasis on use of “less lethal” force wherever possible…but I don’t see how such training would have changed the outcome here one iota, and I really have to say that anyone who expects a civilian paramedic to charge into a standoff with so much potential to reescalate into an active firefight is quite staggeringly stupid.
Understanding why the police acted the way they didn’t isn’t the same as justifying it. You need more than “I can think of a reason why they did it, or a reason why I would’ve done that.” You need something like actually acting in self defense, if it’s going to be anything like a moral justification for killing a person.
He seemed to fall forward, as if he was shot (first? how many other times?) by the person behind him (maybe that’s only because of the slope of the terrain there, or something like). I can understand that person may have thought they trying to defend the other officers who were in front of him, which is fine, although it wouldn’t be literal “self defense” if that’s how it happened.
However, I don’t know they were right to do that, not least because it’s for now hard to see what’s happening in the video (maybe a dashboard camera caught it or something), but also because it happened so fast with no apparent hesitation and no indication at all that he was actually threatening anyone’s life (with some sort of potentially deadly weapon, not verbally and not minutes or hours or days before this incident). Certainly, the people who organized this and put them into this situation (and those who trained them, perhaps ordered them, to fire their guns in situations like this) don’t need to be right about their choices as well. And the people here who don’t see any problem with this, I suppose because you’re very understandably biased against these militia fuckers, well you don’t need to be doing the right thing right now either.
@113 paramedics aren’t *exactly* civilians… They are state employees trained for dangerous situations… But even if no paramedics, shouldn’t officers and agents know first aid and at least cautiously check on the dude? At the very least because he could be playing possum and then jump up and get everybody? Why ignore him and stay back after shooting? What if he had a super scary nuclear ISIS terrorist militia walther ak 99mm suicide vest that needed to be defused in 30 seconds by Elizabeth Peña or it would have destroyed the world?!
@114
Amen. That’s what I’m getting at here. Higher duty… Great power, great responsibility, all that jazz.
There were still people in the vehicle, people of the same ilk as the guy who just almost drove over a cop and tried to draw a gun. I wouldn’t have ordered a paramedic or anyone to attend to Finicum until those in the vehicle were not in a position to shoot at the paramedic. It would only take one militia to get it into his head that the paramedic was making sure that Finicum was dead or harvesting his organs for transfer to the saucer people or whatever for the situation to escalate to a dead paramedic and another dead militia.
It did look a bit casual when the guy with the first aid kit eventually got to Finicum, to my eyes, but that may have been because it was obvious by then that he was dead and beyond resuscitation. I don’t know that I’d trust a police to make that judgement, myself, but I’m not a medic or a cop.
The cops were dealing with somebody who has decided they are going to die and take as many cops as they can with them as they could. There is no way to deescalate that situation once it started. You fail to acknowledge that hard fact. There were two actors in the drama. One was they guy that was going berserker on the police. You only criticize the police.
When I got my WFR training, I was taught that my first responsibility was to make sure that I didn’t become another victim, thus requiring the attention of other first responders, and making the problem worse. I don’t know if that’s the same for EMTs, but it seems likely.
Beyond that, police currently have legal authority beyond self defense. They are trained to shoot to defend themselves AND others.
Are you people really saying they should have waited till he had a gun in his hands?
I can think of a number of ways in which this could have ended without death, but they generally involve having different tools and training on site.
@117
Of *course* I’m criticizing the police – they’re they ones that work for me. I criticize soldiers & firefighters too. Just because I ask if there is anything that could have been done differently doesn’t mean I’m on the side of the fire.
The officers are *professionals* whose ostensible duty is to “serve and protect” and bring people to justice whenever possible without harm. They are not hired (or shouldn’t be) to kill the bad guys. The Malheur militia guys are untrained, entitled, gun fondling assholes. I don’t expect anything else from *them*.
Even if by the last 1 minute of this situation there was nothing else to be done, since the situation ended in someone’s extra judicial death, they deserve criticism. They should criticize themselves. The police can’t control the “bad guys,” only themselves. What more psychology, technology, de-escalation, noon lethal methods could have been deployed at every second since the beginning of the operation?
Try to think if it more like an athlete watching a video of themselves doing a crummy ski-jump – sure they went home at the end of the day, but where could they fix it to make it a perfect 10? Where did that dive go wrong? Except instead of a unexpected belly flop, somebody died, so you watch that video over and over with your coaches to find every place where you can fix anything or do anything differently. This apprehension was simply not gold medal material.
There are more of these jerks (see how I criticize them, they are stupid, irrational, violent jerks), this scenario is *likely* to happen again. I *expect* law enforcement to make changes in their plans to do *better* next time.
Nerd:
You’ve failed to show that’s impossible.
Fine, let’s criticize the guy too. Will our criticisms have killed him? No, words can’t do that. Did he kill someone? No. Did he talk about doing so at one point or another? Yes. Is that an offense that merits execution? No. Was he killed? Yes.
He was a “berserker” in the sense that he was saying things you (and I) don’t like? In the sense that he was driving away and resisting arrest, but apparently didn’t “berserk” on anyone, but got berserked by them instead? What the fuck, in other words, are you talking about, Nerd?
Alteredstory:
You can’t shoot someone unless you have a gun in your hand….
Look, they were already aimed at him, surrounding him from multiple directions. Besides the fact that he was probably shaken/disoriented from just having wrecked his car, it takes time to draw a gun in even the “best” conditions. Defending yourself or someone else would’ve involved reacting to the fact that he actually drew his gun. That’s what I take it is meant by a word like “defense.”
Is that what they did here? Honestly, it’s not clear from the video what they did. But you don’t get to just be afraid that he might do it pretty soon and claim that you were defending yourself/others from an actual threat to life or health. If you’re Han Solo or Indiana Jones, or you’re trying to win in a good old fashioned Wild West gunfight, then you just shoot first and ask questions later. If you want lots of points in a shoot ’em up video game, you just do that. If you’re a responsible cop, or anyone trying to claim they’re protecting someone from an actual threat (not a perceived potential future threat), then it shouldn’t work that way.
I’m 100% on board with criticizing police, and looking for how they could do a better job working for us.
In this case, however, the “better options” involve different training and tactics, and that doesn’t help officers dealing with situations before getting those.
I’m not really sure how long I want police to wait for certainty of a threat, given that different suspects will present different levels of threat, even with the same weapons, what with training, mental state, and so on.
By all means look at what they did and think about how to improve, but that’s different from saying that they screwed up here, or that this is somehow equivalent to the various police killings of black people that have been discussed on this and other blogs.
Fair point. I can see expecting them to wait till he at least clearly had a gun in his hand.
That said, it’s not clear to me that he DIDN’T have a gun in his hand, even if it was caught in the holster or something, that was visible to the officer coming out of the woods. That’s something that I don’t know we’ll ever be sure of (especially given how little I trust what law enforcement people say about any given event.
Coming back to the kinds of critique, however, we then look at what the current policy and training is. The existing precedent, from what I understand, is that they need to have a reasonable expectation that there is a threat. That needs to change, but if those were the rules and training that the officers were using, then their actions were justifiable.
And again, this isn’t an issue of some guy they stopped and they interpreted a gesture as “reaching for a weapon”. This is someone who’s already resisting arrest, who is known to be armed with the stated intention of opening fire on law enforcement. That changes the situation.
Alteredstory:
Of course they had reason to suspect he was probably armed, but they apparently didn’t even see the thing until they searched his body later, since it remained in his pocket and didn’t fall from his hand after having taken it out (because it wasn’t taken out), much less did they see him preparing to actually point it at anyone.
Anyway, what exactly is supposed to be changed? Like I said before, they need to be reasonably sure that he was actually threatening someone’s life, and I mean a “threat” in the sense of actually having some sort of potentially deadly weapon — a gun, a knife, a bomb, his bare hands, whatever — and being in a position to use it against the person who is being defended.
Having made verbal threats to that effect in the past isn’t the sort of threat we’re talking about, so let’s not equivocate about it. We don’t need to know, and it doesn’t help to know, that he expressed his intentions to go down fighting in the past (or to get inside his head and know what his intentions were at that very moment) — but that the cops were responding to an appropriate type of action, like drawing his gun and preparing to point it at a person. A preemptive strike against him before he did anything of the sort (if that’s what the video shows) can’t be an instance of responding to stimuli like that. But that is what they occasionally need to do to protect themselves/others against by using deadly force. They’re not supposed to “protect” anybody from some belligerent words that some incoherent fucker had previously said, since that sort of thing doesn’t tend to immediately result in people dying and eliminating all of your other possible responses (or giving you no time to think about your other possible responses), because they’re just words.
Maybe I’m too accustomed to the current precedent.
I would say so. Just for clarification here, although I’m just repeating myself:
By their own admission (although this certainly can’t be determined by looking hard at the video), they found the gun in his pocket. It was not in his hand or on the ground, even according to them, which suggests to me that they were not responding to some immediate danger to any of the officers there. Perhaps they wouldn’t connect the dots that way, but that is how I interpret that bit of evidence. Who knows what he (or any of them) were saying, but in any case, him signaling somehow that he wanted to escalate the situation (and had the ability to do so) wouldn’t give them a reason to just kill him.
Even if they knew he possessed the gun illegally, let’s say, cops don’t get to murder people for something like that either. If that were the precedent, I don’t think you’d want to get too accustomed to it. You should try to get the person to calm down and cooperate and possibly to turn over their weapon, and only if you’re reasonably sure it’s going to be fired at somebody do you have a genuinely good reason to fire at them defensively. I don’t understand why we should accept any other bullshitty types of reasons for shooting people offensively or preemptively. It’s not something you get to take back if you make a mistake.
Consciosness Razor @126
RE: gun in pocket
At what point do you consider a person who admitted their intentions to be an ‘immediate danger’? Because it sounds to me like it’s only if and when they present themselves as being capable of inflicting immediate harm. But that’s an absurd requirement as allowing another half-second or so is enough to get yourself or others killed.
Reports that Finnicum was armed, his erratic behavior, his reaching for a weapon, his obvious disregard for authority, all those in conjunction are what I would consider to be factors which allow for lethal force. In any other situation where the perpetrator is unknown and no weapon had been seen, sure, allow them the extra .5 second to expose their hand. But in this case it was clear that such an allowance would mean putting yourself or others at risk.
I’d rather Finnicum not be dead, but I’d also rather not have innocent people harmed as well. Finnicum was very clearly not innocent in contributing to his own demise. And I think you’re asking for some type of super-human reaction time if you want to let it get to the point where a hair-trigger is all that separates innocent people from harm.
@115 – I stand by what I said – expecting paramedics to charge in to the scene of a gunfight before it’s secure is massively, staggerly, *grossly*, blazingly, mind-boggling lyrics STUPID. First rule of rescue in any form: don’t become a victim yourself. Why? Because you just make the situation worse, drawing more and more rescuers into peril as each tries to save the brazen dumbass who flung themselves into the fire zone and got gunned down before them. As a former firefighter, this got drilled into my head constantly – don’t put my ass where someone else is likely to have to come in after me….and firefighters routinely face more risk than paramedics are expected to.
They did what they were supposed to do – stop the guy from shooting anybody, secure the other threats on the scene, then promptly render aid to the person they had to shoot. Finicum’s actions drove all of it from the moment he tried to run the roadblock – given the situation, there was nothing else the police could have done.
And seriously, you are coming off as a massive ignoramus just looking for crap to moan over.
@127, you sound exactly like the people defending the cop who killed Tamir Rice. Do you hear yourself saying that the police should wait half a second before shooting a possibly armed person?
@qwints #129
No. As I stated before, this is RADICALLY different from the Tamir Rice case.
The cops in that situation gave NO time for response, and violated procedure every step of the way. Then they left him lying on the ground while there was no other threat to deal with.
Finicum was a known quantity – He had stated an intention to use violence to resist arrest, and he was known have firearms, and the training to use them.
Finicum had also already fled from the first encounter. Rice had had NO interaction with cops prior to the arrival of those that killed him.
Making that comparison, as you did, makes it seem like you’re either clueless about the issues here, or you’re not being honest in your arguments.
@127
There were absolutely different choices that law enforcement could have made after that. Like when securing the armed and dangerous biker gangs that had just murdered people immediately previous.
The point where no other choice could be made was when two officers approached him closely before he was clearly surrendering. If they knew he was so dangerous, threats, heavily armed, etc, getting so close so fast seems like a bad choice… Yes, Monday morning quarterbacking, no idea what it was like, yes, yes, yes. I’m not saying this was an epic, “guy on the ground with his hands on his head was scary, so I shot him” situation…
Just small choices that unnecessarily a situation where a person was shot instead of brought in safely.
To consciousness razor
Protip: The momentum of a bullet, even a high power rifle bullet, is quite small. The direction that someone will fall has very little to do with what direction that they were shot from. The direction that someone will fall depends almost entirely on their current facing direction and posture, the terrain, etc.
…
Quoting Alteredstory
I wish they didn’t, completely or in large part compared to current standards. I do not dispute that this is the way the law is in the United States. I merely argue that this is not how the law should be.
…
Quoting throwaway, butcher of tongues, mauler of metaphor
Completely agreed.
…
To qwints
Context matters.
In this case, the guy was known to be “armed and dangerous”, in a technical sense. The boy was not.
In this case, the guy is without a doubt knowingly resisting arrest. He tried to drive through a police road block. The boy did not.
In this case, the police did make efforts to resolve the situation peacefully and at a distance. See the beginning of the video in this case where they had the situation resolved, until Finicum decided to drive away from the initial scene of the first arrests. No such allowance was done for the boy, where the police cruiser drives up as close as possible, gets out, and shoots the boy dead in seconds. Finicum had 10s of minutes to understand the situation. The boy had seconds.
Plus more. Comparing the two situations is just not reasonable.
…
To zardeenah
I’ve been asking you this question for a while. You haven’t even tried to answer it. You say that they could have done something else.
Like what?!
At some point, in order to enact arrest, police need to approach the suspect on foot, which puts them in the situation where they might need to shoot the suspect dead in order to defend their own lives if and when the suspect draws a firearm. There is simply no way around this unfortunate reality. The alternative is to always never use force and always let the criminal run away if the criminal threatens violence in order to resist arrest, and that is not an acceptable policy.
1) He has public statements saying he won’t go down without firing.
2) He has publicly threatened police.
3) It is a fact that he is carrying a gun.
4) His hands move towards the gun.
5) The people in the other car surrendered, but he revved his car and tried to drive away before even hitting the blockade.
6) He nearly ran over some dude when he saw that blockade.
If there was any situation in which a cop is allowed to fire at someone without being fired at first, this is it.
@EnlightenmentLiberal #132
I agree. Among other things, they could probably used full-sized ballistic shields to deal with most cases where they’re approaching a suspect they think is (or might be) armed. Tactics like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw (start about 3 minutes in) could have worked in this case and in other cases, and you wouldn’t need 30 officers to do it.
@134 – You do realize that most ballistic shields won’t stop long-arm fire, right? And that those that do aren’t designed to be carried, but *rolled*, more closely resembling a mantlet than a shield? Then there’s the problem that such shields only provide protection from one direction and that the shields that can be readily carried only provide partial cover for the officer?
There are times and places where they are valuable tools and where more use of them could help reduce police lethality….but stopping a car full of seditious AR-15 toting gun fondlers probably isn’t one of them.
VP @133:
His hands do far more than “move towards” the gun. Allowing for the lack of resolution of the image, he is fairly clearly trying to draw a weapon for several seconds. The shooting of Finnicum isn’t the gut reaction of a nervous cop to someone twitching wrong or reaching for his ID too quickly, in all probability, it’s a reaction to someone who has his hands (kind of) up who decides to make an out-and-out move for his gun, and is probably told not to do it by one or more of the police covering him while he’s struggling with his pocket or zip or whatever slowed him down.
It’s a distinction worth pointing out, that whenever an innocent is shot by police and they emit the line that they “looked like they were going for a gun” it is usually 90% bullshit and 10% more bullshit, whereas in this case the guy is either making a move for a weapon or for his lucky police-bullet-repelling mascot and is allowed to do it for more than enough time for the police to advise him that that’s a very bad idea. If we ever see footage from individual cop-cams I’m betting we’ll hear police shouting at him to stop with the fucking around and put his hands back up before he’s shot.
@135 SOME are designed to be rolled, some are designed to be carried, and some are, in fact, designed to stop long-arm fire.
To Alteredstory
You’re grasping at straws.
The police will eventually need to move outside their rolling ballistic shields and approach the suspect on foot, at which point the suspect can draw a weapon, and then we’re back to square one.
The only way that I see out of this predicament is to allow the police to demand that suspects strip naked on the spot in order to demonstrate that they are not armed, and that this precedes the first cop approaching to put on handcuffs and otherwise subdue the person.
Also, there’s all of the circumstances where they cannot bring a stupidly heavy 6 ft slab of steel on motorized wheels. Protip: There’s a reason our soldiers do not have such things. There’s a reason why our soldiers do not fight in power armor. It’s the same reason that your suggestions for cops is silly and not based in reality.
I appreciate the need to examine every case and try to make the actions of police less lethal as best as we can. However, I find your seeming total pacifistic attitude repugnant because of the sheer amount of wishful thinking and outright willful ignorance and denial that you have to engage in, in order to hold the positions that you do. If you are going to be so bold as to say that there are ways out of every situation without shooting the person, I damn well want you to have researched your position and be able to defend it, something which you are obviously not capable of doing, because you are behaving like an ignorant fool.