A kid by the name of Chase Allan was basically executed by Farmington, Utah police back in 2023.
He wasn’t cooperating during a traffic stop for his lack of license plates as he was a “sovereign citizen”.
The police surrounded his car and noticed a gun on the right seat floor and started shouting “Gun! Gun! Gun!”. They all pulled their pieces and blasted away.
When his mother sued, a magistrate judge dismissed it all as necessary force since he had a gun and was “resisting”. There’s a reason police scream “stop resisting” - it’s a predicate to lethal force.
There is no constraint on the police to try to disarm someone. They are told that if they even think you have a gun, they have a right to blast you out of your socks (cop buddy of mine used those exact words decades ago).
Such an assertion can break down in a court when a jury hears all the evidence. But so far, in the world where the Rat party doesn’t have a dog in the fight, anytime someone gets dead this way - especially White males - there’s basically no controversy: the cop had the right to do it.
So all the crap about Pretti being just a nasty protestor, not really going for his gun, etc is just legal noise: the fact that he was engaged in resisting legitimate police orders to desist and then being discovered to be armed gives them (supposedly) the right to nullify the threat...that means making you dead.
Some one might want to point all that out. In the cases of Ashli Babbitt and Chase Allan, the verdict has always been “the police had the right”.
“So all the crap about Pretti being just a nasty protestor, not really going for his gun, etc is just legal noise: the fact that he was engaged in resisting legitimate police orders to desist and then being discovered to be armed gives them (supposedly) the right to nullify the threat...that means making you dead.”
____________________________________________________________
The ICE officers removed the gun Pretti was legally carrying, and took it away from the fight before Pretti was shot 10 times. Once the gun is gone, the threat is gone.
It was a legally unjustified killing, and it’s amazing that so many here who routinely distrust all federal law enforcement now think of ICE as their heroes.
I get all that. As long as it’s done consistently though...
Ashley Babbitt is a great example of her posing no direct threat to a cop, but the counterargument in her case is context: an armed cop was warning several people who (from his point of view) were trying to break through a closed door. He didn’t know if they were armed or not. At the very least there was going to be a warning shot and the likelihood of SOMEONE getting a bullet was high.
I don’t swing from being 100% binary on one side, to being 100% binary on the other, simply because of who’s the shooter and who’s the victim. I go by PRINCIPLE.
As far as I’m concerned, all cops should act professionally and proportionately at all times. If they’re acting within the law and their code of conduct, civilian recordings may vindicate any wrongful accusations made against them. But if they’re acting unprofessionally, and the cameras are catching them crossing the line, then of course the citizen has every right to film it.
That principle doesn’t care if the protester is MAGA or Antifa, and it doesn’t care if the shooter is ICE or a Capitol cop.
Half the reason why the USA is such a tinderbox right now is that partisanship has taken the place of principle to an insane degree.
If there was an exact replay of the Babbitt incident tomorrow, but with an ICE cop instead of a Capitol cop, shooting a pro-immigration libtard instead of a MAGA protester, I’d put a big bet on the MAGA commentariat saying “she got it coming” without any attempt to fact-check, AND the liberal media saying “it was murder!” even if it patently wasn’t.