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.
Then maybe we should have actual standards for who becomes a cop? But that’d leave us with no cops. Problem solved?
@ivanafterall @MicroWave @samuraipizzacat420
Sounds good. 👍
So cops have the same IQ as users on The Site That Shall Not Be Named, right?
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.
No one has a legal obligation to speak to the police.
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.
This isn’t so clear cut, the police did try to ask questions first.
I appreciate your attempt to try taking a nuanced view, but you prove yourself wrong by the end of it.
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.
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.
Yeah, I don’t know why so many people seem to forget this, but cops aren’t supposed to shoot guilty people either.
the fact the police are people and some have families and their own wants and needs will mess with anyone’s line of thinking.
Almost like they should be carefully evaluated and trained to make sure they can properly handle tense situations.
Police have to be ready to risk opening the door to confirm a dangerous suspect before they use force to try and save themselves.
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).
fact the police are people and some have families and their own wants and needs will mess with anyone’s line of thinking.
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.
