ABATTBQ11 said:
AgGrad99 said:
Quote:
Peaceful has nothing to do with it. Until someone draws a weapon or presents an immediate threat to you, you don't have a justification to shoot them.
It has everything to do with it, which is why it's in our Bill of Rights.
His pistol was removed, and it appears accidentally discharged. If your the officer(s), are you protecting yourself against a violent agitator, or exposing yourself to getting shot while you figure out where the first round came from?
I'm not justifying the killing, but it's reasonable to understand how it happened to a guy who was violently confronting LEOs.
The fact you can't consider both sides, tells me you simply dont want to.
No, it doesn't appear that it was accidentally discharged. That's mere supposition and theory, based on the SIG P320's history with accidental discharges, to justify why agents shot him when he surrounded by agents and it was impossible for them to have seen a weapon in his hands. There's no evidence, as far as I've seen, that shows or suggests his gun was actually fired. We do know that 2 agents discharged their own firearms.
Alex Pretti had a role in his own death, but he also wasn't the trained professional holding and discharging a gun. If you want to tell me I should consider both sides, maybe consider doing the same.
Are you familiar with the concept of a "root cause" analysis? It is something health and safety professionals use in the investigation of industrial accidents. Basically, you are not allowed to call stupidity or incompetence the root cause of the incident because your safety processes are supposed to be able to protect people against their own stupidity or incompetence. So in root cause analysis when you come to a point where you say "oh, this happened because ICE officers fired shots when they should not have" (poor decision making), you have to keep digging. Then you come up against the stupid decision made by Pretti to step into the ICE scene and start getting in the way of the ICE agent (moral or not, it was a stupid decision). And you layer on that he did it while armed with a (poorly) concealed weapon without alerting officers to it first (also very stupid). None of those can be the "root cause" of this shooting.
So you move to what kinds of protections should have been in place to prevent such a thing from happening? Well ICE should have kept their operations clandestine so as not to attract the attention of potential protestors who might interfere, using unmarked cars and such. They were deliberately thwarted in doing that step by an active Signal group chat administered by MN politicians with the specific design of spotting ICE movements, getting people to those locations quickly and efficiently, and deliberately interfering with them by blocking their vehicles and calling attention to them with noise.
So what steps could ICE take to minimize the impacts of such a (illegal) program and still conduct their operations safely? They could work closely with local law enforcement to arrest people trying to interfere and have local law enforcement guard scenes where ICE is doing their work. Once again, MN politicians have given stand down orders to local law enforcement agencies who would have otherwise been able to help keep these ICE scenes from becoming the chaotic messes. That decision is the root cause in my opinion that has now led to two shootings of the people sent to the ICE locations to illegally interfere.
I will agree with you that analyzing just the 10 seconds or so of the most widely circulated video paints a picture of a guy just happening by the scene who rushes to the aid of a woman being abused by an ICE officer. That is EXACTLY what the person who cut that video wanted you to think. The reality is that both people involved were part of a deliberate operation operated by MN politicians to interfere illegally with ICE operations. The woman was not just standing on the sidewalk or stepping in front of the car. She had been involved in trying to block the ICE movements repeatedly leading up to the moment seen on the short video and was being shoved to get her out of the street and away from the officer's face. Pretti was not a good samaritan passing by who rushed to aid the woman, he was standing in the street trying to direct other vehicles that were part of their group to move into the road to continue blocking the ICE vehicles and then rushed over to confront the officer and impede him from getting the woman off the street and out of the way.
These were people (stupidly) making deliberate and illegal acts to impede the ICE officers from doing their jobs, but the root cause of the whole situation was MN politicians deciding to set up a program to send useful idiots out to interfere with ICE and to simultaneously withhold local LEOs from helping ICE keep control of the scenes to prevent chaos. Does any of that mean that the decision of the ICE officers to use deadly force in a split second decision in the middle of the chaos was a good one? No. They shot somebody who was ultimately determined (in the 20/20 hindsight of after action review) to not be a deadly threat to them (because he had been disarmed seconds earlier). But the root cause of the death was the actions of the people sending useful idiots out to interfere and then to prevent local LEOs from stopping them.
