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Police who fatally shot a pregnant woman are sued by her family in Colorado (apnews.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] -3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    They shouldn’t have escalated, but they were potentially within their rights to. For all they knew they’d surrounded their knife 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.

    they were acting within their authority

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm guessing you're referring to your other comment.

    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.

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I edited it with a link when I realized you weren't in that comment chain.

    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.

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    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?

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    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:

    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.

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Your argument seems to be that all the responsibility lies with police, simply because they're police.

    She wasn't just a random pregnant woman. She partially matched the description they'd been given (female, white tank top, part hispanic) and while she didn't have a chest tattoo and was pregnant these might not have been immediately obvious - we don't know how far along she was and they probably didn't have a chance to look for a tattoo before she jumped in the car. Her refusal to identify herself (which she is legally obligated to do) further makes her seem like their suspect. The police had every reason to think she was the knife robber.

    Assume for a moment: what if she was the knife robber? The police are then faced with the urgency of preventing further crime - if they allow her to escape, there's a high likelihood that she will a) cause harm to someone with reckless driving while trying to escape, or b) go on to rob someone else, which could easily lead to harm if they don't comply. The police have to stop her.

    The police definitely deserve criticism and should be looking to modify their behaviours, in general. Here though, the criticism doesn't have much weight behind it, because the suspect holds a significant amount of responsibility for what happened. She did not identify herself to the police. She inadvertently led them to believe she was their violent suspect. She tried to escape and drive through police officers. We can certainly discuss whether or when it was necessary to smash the window (in particular, I think smashing the passenger window was stupid - if they'd smashed the driver's window she might not have reacted so quickly) however the police had every right to detain her and use force due to her non-compliance.

    These are peoples' lives. And police have to balance the suspect's life against those of the suspect's potential victims. Again, the police had every reason to think she was their knife suspect, who could go on to harm someone. If she was, and the police didn't stop her, and she did go on to kill someone, then the police would be blamed for their inaction.

    My dismissal is because you're assuming perfect knowledge of the situation. That isn't practicable, and is downright unlikely in these circumstances - and a big part of that is because of the actions of the suspect.

    It's within the legal framework for police to use reasonable force to stop a violent criminal. They had every reason to think she was their violent criminal.

    How would you suggest the legal framework be changed, such that it could both protect a non-compliant but non-violent criminal while simulatenously allowing necessary force to be used to stop violent criminals? The issue at the core is mistaken identity, but the suspect refused to identify themselves, so how can the legal system or police fix that?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    Most of your response indicates that either I'm failing to adequately convey my viewpoint or you are failing to fully comprehend it. The fault might very well be mine, but I'm not really enthusiastic about trying to rephrase it again, especially with the likelihood that you'll reject it out of hand again.

    I'll just pluck at these two points.

    Your argument seems to be that all the responsibility lies with police, simply because they’re police.

    My argument is that the vast, vast majority of the responsibility lies with police because their training and behavior are the controllable variables in the interaction, and they are the ones empowered to end lives and deploy violence based on their assessment of the situation, and who should be trained to do so with the utmost care.

    The issue at the core is mistaken identity, but the suspect refused to identify themselves, so how can the legal system or police fix that?

    The very clear answer is that they do so by treating people as innocent until they have more to go on than a failure to comply and a partial description match (christ, "you match the description" is the most commonly cited example of racial profiling I can remember hearing) to decide otherwise. Had they done so, something less escalating than smashing out a window would have been done, regardless of whether you and I agree on the details of what that something could have been.

    Frankly, with no snark intended, I think there's little chance that further discussion is going to cause either of us to change our minds.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    But she wasn't innocent. She had warrants out for her arrest, and while the police did not know about that, she did refuse to identify herself which is also an offense. Then, when she drove the car into the officers she presented a very real threat to them. This isn't an example of racial profiling, either, and one way or another they would have had to get her out of the car, which was probably going to involve smashing a window at some stage.

    While ordinarily and in general I agree with your points, they really don't apply well enough here. The police were far from perfect, but she was further.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    But she wasn’t innocent.

    She was innocent of the crime you have used to justify their escalation throughout this entire discussion. Had they treated her with the presumption of such, given their extremely shaky evidence to the contrary, different decisions could have (and should have) been made, as I've expressed a number of times already.

    Thank you, and have a good day.

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