Nahel drove forward, dumping the one Officer, and, having run one red light, putting innocent drivers at risk, thus mandated that he be stopped. Allowing a “crazy” and/or “intoxicated” driver to escape would have been intolerable. The shot was justified to protect the innocent.

I am aware of several local “accidents” involving fleeing suspects or drunks, that resulted in the death and/or maiming of innocent individuals. Shoot and protect the innocent. Nahel, apparently, thought that he was exempt from the law, or too smart to have to obey. He wasn’t.

I’m not sure I understand your logic here. Was the driver somehow justified in trying to evade the cops? I’m pretty sure that’s illegal and the cops had a responsibility to attempt to place the driver under arrest.

People who flee the police tend to do so for a reason. They are often criminals, engaged in other illegal activity and are often armed. Police routinely point guns at the occupants of vehicles that have been stopped after fleeing them and for good reason. From what I know, that’s standard procedure.

So your emphasis of “already pointing a gun at them” as if that somehow justifies the driver attempting to flee again doesn’t quite compute for me. If you flee from the cops, you should expect them to point a gun at you when they get you stopped. And this reportedly wasn’t the driver’s first rodeo either. He’d been charged with exactly the same thing on more than one occasion in the past so he should have known exactly what to expect.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you here, but the impression I’m getting is that you don’t feel the police had any business in trying to arrest the driver or in pointing a gun at him in the first place.

I disagree. That’s kind of their job.

Furthermore, attempting to continue fleeing the police while one of them has a gun pointed at you is not a rational act, it’s a desperate one. Desperate people are dangerous. My opinion remains unchanged. The Police were in a situation where the wielder of a two ton lethal weapon posed a potentially deadly threat and, in that split second, made a rational decision to employ equally deadly force to end the threat.

Good shoot (IMHO).

Side note: from what I’ve read, they didn’t “stop at a red light”, they stopped because the traffic in front of them blocked their ability to continue fleeing. That traffic may have been stopped at a red light, but the implication that they stopped voluntarily to obey an automated traffic signal appears to be inaccurate.

The car had been moving forward to evade the cops, it stopped for a red light, and then moved forward again to evade a cop who was already pointing a gun at them. The car made no attempt to go towards the cop who had a weapon drawn. I am very aware of the “car as possible weapon” idea, but this situation just doesn’t appear to rise to the level of firing that weapon.

Nope – I finally saw the video: The cop was on the driver’s side just in front of the mirror aiming his weapon at the driver through the windshield. You could clearly hear the engine rev and the car moved forward a foot or so…enough that the cop was being pushed backward by it…before the cop fired.

I have a feeling that an armchair quarterback watching it later might decide that the cop wasn’t in any “real” danger, but in my personal opinion, in the heat of the moment, I think it was reasonable for the cop to fear for his life and safety (along with that of the general public) based on his position relative to the vehicle and I think the shoot was justified.

When the car took off, it went straight forward and missed the cops, but the driver could have easily turned the wheel to the left and caught the one who fired under the wheels of the vehicle. Even moving forward, the mirror could have knocked the cop down and put him at risk of the rear wheels running him over.

It’s no different than if the perpetrator had started aiming a gun at the cop. The cop would have had no way of knowing if the gun was loaded or even a real gun, he would have been justified to shoot.

Same thing here: the cop had no way of knowing that the driver would drive straight forward or that he wouldn’t be knocked under the wheels; as soon as the engine revved and the car started moving, he was in deadly danger and, again in my opinion, the decision to shoot was reasonable.

Of course, for political reasons if nothing else, there’s a very high probability that the cop will be convicted of something and sent to prison.

Which is just another data point illustrating why cops these days are either retiring, finding other lines of work or simply not engaging the bad guys when they should be. When they know they can be prosecuted and put in jail for defending themselves or just doing their jobs, I can’t blame them for being a bit less than enthusiastic about putting themselves in a position where things might get froggy.

Which makes a quote I stole from a fellow gun blogger years ago even more appropriate in today’s environment:

“Your safety and protection is your job. The constables are just there to mark where the bodies ended up.”
–Phil of Random Nuclear Strikes

From what I have read, the car was not moving at the time – I think perhaps stopped at a light or for traffic. The driver had been refusing to stop for the police, but the occupants had shown no indication of trying to use the car as a weapon at any point.

Or anybody down the road while fleeing. I believe some or many US jurisdictions allow for lethal force.

The impression I’m getting is that many people are just dismissing the cop’s use of deadly force out of hand because the kid didn’t have a “traditional” weapons.

A vehicle is absolutely, positively a lethal weapon. If the kid was attempting to move the vehicle with cops standing anywhere where they could reasonably perceive that they may be run over by it, that is justification for the use of deadly force.

Just because people take cars for granted doesn’t make them any less deadly to pedestrians or even other drivers. If he was operating that vehicle in a way that indicated he might run over one of the cops, it’s no different than if he’d have pointed a gun at them.

I guess even the Muslims don’t want a lot of Muslims in their countries …