Destinee Thompson was supposed to be on her way to lunch with her stepmother in August 2021 when Colorado police, mistaking her for a robbery suspect, fatally shot the pregnant mother as she fled in her minivan.
Destinee Thompson was supposed to be on her way to lunch with her stepmother in August 2021 when Colorado police, mistaking her for a robbery suspect, fatally shot the pregnant mother as she fled in her minivan.
I don’t like “the shoot first, ask questions later” mentality. I always thought a cop should be a white knight. They need to be ready to throw down their lives to save someone. A us vs them mentality, the fact the police are people and some have families and their own wants and needs will mess with anyone’s line of thinking. Police have to be ready to risk opening the door to confirm a dangerous suspect before they use force to try and save themselves.
Yeah, I don’t know why so many people seem to forget this, but cops aren’t supposed to shoot guilty people either.
Judge Dredd was suppose to be cynical satire not something we actually want
Then maybe we should have actual standards for who becomes a cop? But that’d leave us with no cops. Problem solved?
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So cops have the same IQ as users on The Site That Shall Not Be Named, right?
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@ivanafterall @MicroWave @samuraipizzacat420
Sounds good. 👍
Almost like they should be carefully evaluated and trained to make sure they can properly handle tense situations.
Not if they are protected by every level of the system from any possible consequences. So much easier to just assume all citizens are a potential enemy and go in gun’s blazing. Just to be safe (for themselves).
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As human beings with families and wants and needs they should have the empathy to realize their escalations are going to end or permanently change the state of someone else’s life. They are the trained professionals.
The person they are trying to talk to could be stupid, deaf, high, mentally challenged, terrified, in the midst of a panic attack or breakdown from other causes, or any of a million other things that will cause them to not comply as expected.
Once she was in the car, block her in, call for backup. While you wait for them do one of the tens of other possible choices I’m not taking the time to list right now to immobilize the vehicle without smashing a window and putting a potentially innocent person deeper into their very human, very biological fight or flight response.
This isn’t so clear cut, the police did try to ask questions first. They asked her to stop and speak to them, she kept walking and got in the car. They asked her to get out and speak to them, she refused. They broke the window (escalation) so she panicked and tried to drive away, smashed a police car behind and then drove forwards over the curb. At that point she’s using her car in a very dangerous manner, so lethal force is potentially justified.
However the police shouldn’t have escalated by breaking the window to begin with. They had her contained, she was no longer a risk, not until they escalated.
No one has a legal obligation to speak to the police. If she was a suspect, they could have stopped her before she entered her vehicle. This was murder.
That isn’t entirely true. In roughly half of the states, if an officer suspects you of a crime you are obligated to identify yourself and provide your name. Colorado is one such state.
This lady partially matched the description of a robbery suspect who had threatened someone with a knife. They tried to stop her before she entered her vehicle, but were not able to. They had every right to ask her name and what she was doing, to determine if she was the knife wielding robber they were looking for, and she was legally obligated to answer.
They should not have escalated by breaking the window. However, once she started driving the car dangerously, lethal force was justified. Whether lethal force was absolutely necessary would depend on specifics we don’t know from this article, but the legal bar had been met. The fault is with their escalation prior to the use of lethal force.
I appreciate your attempt to try taking a nuanced view, but you prove yourself wrong by the end of it.
So in other words, it is clear cut.
They shouldn’t have escalated, but they were potentially within their rights to. For all they knew they’d surrounded their knife robbery suspect.
Like, the best course of action would’ve been for her to say she lived there and deny being at the store, and tell them she’s pregnant so hopefully they’d realise she didn’t fully match the description and leave her alone. Hell, even telling them who she was and getting arrested for her outstanding warrant (which no doubt influenced her behaviour) would have been better than getting killed.
Ultimately it was the worst outcome. While the police perhaps didn’t do enough to avoid it and de-escalate, they were acting within their authority for chasing down a robbery suspect.
Even if they had, what’s the downside to proceeding exactly as I described above? The suspect might live despite a failure to comply? They might not get to use enough force that day? Block her in, stand back, spike the tires. Wait for backup. She’s pregnant, she’ll need to pee in 10 minutes.
And this is one of the myriad reasons that police reform is needed.
Edit: I realized my comment that I make reference to here was not in reply to you so you didn’t see it. Here it is.
I’m guessing you’re referring to your other comment.
They had the car surrounded, they had a car behind and curb in front, as well as 5 officers. There wasn’t much more backup to call. They thought she was their knife robber, who was looking to escape and might go on to commit further crimes or even kill someone. Smashing the window to extract her is going to be a logical step at some point, the question is when that becomes necessary.
I also have no clue what you’re imagining to immobilise the car. Shooting tyres out doesn’t stop a car from driving, it just stops it from driving properly (possibly making it more dangerous). There’s not much they can do to guarantee she doesn’t try and force the car out.
Police reform is needed, but not over their authority in this circumstance. We want police to catch violent criminals who rob people with knives or guns or whatever weapons, to protect their victims. However they need much better training in de-escalation practices.
I edited it with a link when I realized you weren’t in that comment chain.
We want them to do it in a way that doesn’t involve folks who aren’t violent criminals getting shot to death though, right?
My inability to provide a scenario you are happy with doesn’t mean there wasn’t one in which this woman could have lived, even while recognizing that she, the untrained person, might not behave correctly due to fear or other circumstances. And when you have police who realize they could be actually targeting the wrong person, it seems pretty reasonable to bring the entire precinct down to surround the car if that’s what’s needed to prevent a wrongful death.
Roll back the tape a little and let her see 10 cop cars blocking the exit of the parking lot, and have a cop there with a bullhorn or a sign telling her that coming out is her only option and see if it plays the same as smashing her window. Might it inconvenience the cops more? Yep. Should she probably end up with charges for the behavior? Yep. Does it save a wrongful death? YEP.
Yes. However in this case they had every reason to believe they had a violent suspect. The circumstance just has a very unfortunate overlap where a non-violent suspect with a warrant got confused with a violent one in the same area wearing the same colour top and roughly the same ethnicity. It’s harder to imagine a situation where the police wouldn’t reasonably think she was the suspect they were after, given her behaviour.
I’d be reluctant to call it a wrongful death, even. It was probably avoidable, however in the heat of the moment she was driving her car through a crowd of officers, so the officers have every right to shoot her to get her to stop.
It’s very easy to sit back in your chair with the luxury of hindsight and say how things could have been handled differently - they could have had more cars, they could have surrounded her better, whatever. That doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable to expect all of that to be done in a high pressure situation. I mean, can you really argue that they should have done all that without arguing that she shouldn’t have tried to drive away?
I’m arguing that one of those two entities is an (almost certainly) quite well outfitted police department who are supposed to be professionals and who are trained to operate in high pressure situations.
She was a random pregnant woman who could also have been any of those other things I previously listed (or more), and who panicked in a very human response to a threat. You can claim she only panicked because she had a warrant, but that’s at least as speculative as anything I’ve said, and IMO more so. LOTS of people, especially of color, fear police, whether they have done anything wrong or not, and would especially do so in a circumstance such as this.
If they aren’t training to allow for that possibility in a high pressure situation and behaving accordingly, there is a gigantic mismatch between what police are supposedly for and what they appear to actually be for.
Their mandate requires them to be authorized to use deadly force when they deem necessary, and basic ethics requires them to take all possible care to avoid application of that force against the wrong people, or without sufficient provocation.
They should cheerfully expect be criticized from every corner and required to aggressively look for modifications to their own processes whenever their actions result in a questionable death, or else they shouldn’t accept the responsibility of being legally empowered to deploy deadly force.
Edit: And by the way. I don’t accept this dismissal whatsoever:
These are peoples’ lives. I don’t need qualification to be able to render a thoughtful and ethical opinion about the ease with which our police force ends, alters, or otherwise permanently changes them when they make these mistakes without accepting culpability for the outcomes. If it’s within our legal framework for them to be able to do so, then our legal framework needs some work.