Sorry, I was basing my comment on your description that "Little was going 76mph down Florida Avenue, NE in a stolen van attempting to evade police", which I interpreted as meaning that police were chasing him. I'll remove my other comment above.

Why? This guy committed a crime and was sentenced. That's the system working.

He can attempt to vacate the plea deal if he wants, but no judge has to grant his request.

Remind me to reply when the body cam footage (which the park police have so far refused to release) comes out. If you're right and this was in self defense for the cops, I'll give you a cookie.

>And if you're the type to not comply with the police (see: dumbass dead 17 year old), cops are going to have to come into the car to detain you.

I keep bringing it up because folks like you keep thinking that he was given an opportunity to comply with the cops, even though that's not what the police spokesman claimed.

Read the paragraphs I quoted above again with the cops' description. It says:

1. The kid was asleep in the car.
2. The cop jumped in the back seat of the car.
3. The kid hit the accelerator pedal.
4. The cop inside the car told him to stop.
5. The cop inside the car shot him.

Number 3 is a perfectly reasonable reaction when some dude you don't know jumps in the back seat of the car while you're asleep. Not that it would justify his death - but this wasn't a lengthy car chase where the kid knew he was running from the cops. According to the police statements, at most a few seconds passed between the cop surprising the kid awake and shooting him.

The idea that he deserved to die for "not complying" with the cops in the dangerous and volatile situation they created is total bullshit.

What about the cop surprising a sleeping driver by jumping in the back of a running car struck you as "reasonable"?

>If you are dumb enough to fall asleep in a stolen car and then try to flee, you deserve whatever happens.

Thank you. There's been a lot of beating around the bush in this thread, but you're one of the only ones brave enough to admit that you think he deserved to die for stealing the car and trying to flee.

Based on their comments, I'm sure that's what other people here are thinking too - but the (likely bullshit) story about the cop being "dragged" by the car offers a fig leaf justification that they can use to pretend it's about officer safety.

I don't agree, by the way - but I have an easier time talking with people who admit they think teenagers should be shot for stealing cars rather than pretending the cops' self-defense claims in this case have any credibility.

Let's say you're sleeping in the driver's seat of a parked car and somebody you don't know jumps in the back seat.

Do you calmly turn and say "Oh hi, officer - I didn't see you there. How can I help?" - or would it be reasonable to freak out and hit the gas pedal trying to get out of that situation?

The cop that shot the kid wasn't in any danger:

>The incident began when D.C. police received a call about a suspicious vehicle, and officers found the car parked with the engine running, according to a D.C. police spokesman. The driver appeared to be asleep or nodding off, the spokesman said. The officers ran the tags and determined the vehicle was stolen, according to the spokesman, and called for backup.

>Two Park Police officers responded to the call near 34th and Baker streets NE, said Park Police spokesman Thomas Twiname. They approached the car, and one of them got into the back seat, at which point the driver appeared to wake up and hit the accelerator, the D.C. police spokesman said.

>The officer was “trapped in the vehicle,” Twiname said, and unable to escape. The officer gave commands to stop and then discharged a firearm, Twiname said. The driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/18/park-police-shooting-dc/

There could be justification for the shooting if the other officer was endangered by being "dragged" by the vehicle, but we won't really know until the FOIA request forces them to release the body cam footage.

Unfortunately, even if that officer was "dragged" the cops still could have handled it better (e.g. by not jumping into the backseat unannounced, where the driver may have no idea who you are and -understandably- started to drive away).

Copying here to avoid the paywall:

>The incident began when D.C. police received a call about a suspicious vehicle, and officers found the car parked with the engine running, according to a D.C. police spokesman. The driver appeared to be asleep or nodding off, the spokesman said. The officers ran the tags and determined the vehicle was stolen, according to the spokesman, and called for backup.

>Two Park Police officers responded to the call near 34th and Baker streets NE, said Park Police spokesman Thomas Twiname. They approached the car, and one of them got into the back seat, at which point the driver appeared to wake up and hit the accelerator, the D.C. police spokesman said.

>The officer was “trapped in the vehicle,” Twiname said, and unable to escape. The officer gave commands to stop and then discharged a firearm, Twiname said. The driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

>How can you say he didn’t pose a threat?

Because he was asleep inside the car when police found him:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/18/park-police-shooting-dc/

Which is a pretty crucial detail missing from OP's article.

Driving shitfaced would meet the legal standard for proximate cause of an accident, since it would be reasonably foreseeable that doing that could result in someone's injury or death.

It would be reasonable to use force to stop a drunk driver from endangering other people.

The car thief in this story didn't pose a danger to anyone until the Police got involved.

Simply stealing a car doesn't justify the use of force, nor should it justify his death.

>USPP pursued a vehicle in Rock Creek Park and that driver killed 3 innocent people.

Which is exactly why many jurisdictions don't allow police to engage in car chases anymore (unless there's an immediate danger to someone's life or personal safety).

You're blaming that driver here, but it's really the same situation: the cops wanted to catch a bad guy and they created a situation which resulted in somebody's death.

>made a lawful attempt

Basically a meaningless distinction here - almost anything cops do is considered "a lawful attempt" simply because they're cops.

That doesn't mean it was the right thing to do, or even that it would still be a legal thing to do if we had a justice system that held police to the same standard as everybody else.

>How would you have apprehended him?

Slip an air tag in the car or hit him with one of these, then track him down later. The car thief didn't pose an immediate danger to anyone until the cops got involved, so there was no reason for them to create the situation which resulted in his death.

I understand that opinion, but from a legal perspective there are only two options:

1. Martin (the 17-year old) was at fault by endangering the cops' safety, and was shot in self-defense.

2. The cops were not in danger, which would nullify their self-defense claim and open them up to manslaughter charges.

There's no legal option where "stealing a car led to that outcome" because stealing a car doesn't meet the standard for a proximate cause:

>The most common test of proximate cause under the American legal system is foreseeability. It determines if the harm resulting from an action could reasonably have been predicted[...]

>A "threefold test" of foreseeability of damage, proximity of relationship and reasonableness was established in the case of Caparo v Dickman (1990) and adopted in the litigation between Lungowe and others and Vedanta Resources plc (Supreme Court ruling 2019).[7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause

With so much on the line, you understand that the cops would have a reason to lie: either Martin endangered their safety, or one of those cops is going to jail.

I'm not defending the crime he committed.

I'm saying he shouldn't have lost his life for stealing a car, and that the cops created a situation which led to that outcome.

>The kid refused to get out of the car, so the cops tried to remove him. escalated the situation until they had no choice but to shoot him.

FTFY, and that's assuming you believe the cops' story about the officer (who wasn't inside the car) being dragged.

>Assuming the article is accurate.

Big assumption.

After the news about the Atlanta cops last week I'm not trusting statements put out by the police unless there's a body cam or dashcam video supporting what they say.

You're still assuming that homicides are replacing assaults.

That's one possible explanation, but there isn't nearly enough information in the chart above to conclude that. An alternative explanation could just be that Covid made people stay inside, and that assaults happen more to strangers on the street while homicide happens more often between people who know each other and who spend lots of time together indoors.

Spending more time indoors could explain those trends just as easily as increased gun ownership. There isn't enough info in the chart above to tell which of those factors is having an impact.

Assaults are down. Homicides are up.

I don't think we can speculate that a third variable (deadlier or more accurate guns) caused either of those trends - at least not based on this data alone.

>Murders went down a ton due to police presence.

Source?

Whether a number hits 200 or not is kind of a helpful metric, but it can be more informative to just look at the actual totals:

Data for other years is available here:

• https://mpdc.dc.gov/annualreports
• https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm

I'm sure brigadiers factor into it, but a less comfortable truth is that there's a lot of internalized racism and class discrimination among the young white professionals who live in DC and frequent this subreddit - and discussions about police and homelessness tends to draw those attitudes out.

Unlearning internalized racism and class discrimination takes work - and there's no guarantee that people in this subreddit have done that work just because they live in D.C. or vote for progressive Democrats.

DC crime stats 1992-2022:

* Theft / Larceny was reported under a single category until the mid 00's, but two separate categories in later years (Theft from Motor Vehicle and Theft (Other)). I've combined the two categories here for direct comparison between the reports.

Data for other years is available here:

• https://mpdc.dc.gov/annualreports
• https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm

>Despite politicized claims that this rise was the result of criminal justice reform in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, murders rose roughly equally in cities run by Republicans and cities run by Democrats. So-called “red” states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all. This data makes it difficult to pin recent trends on local policy shifts and reveals the basic inaccuracy of attempts to politicize a problem as complex as crime.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myths-and-realities-understanding-recent-trends-violent-crime

It's also important to note that this increase was for homicides, not overall crime. Overall crime has continued to decrease both nationally and in DC.

DC crime stats:

They've actually gotten a great ROI from their lobbying:

>Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, KochPAC, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

So they'd spent about $250M in publicly traceable contributions by 2010. Let's double that for any contributions they've made since 2010, and multiply everything x 10 to make a guess at their untraceable contributions, so a ballpark of $5 billion total.

$5 billion is only about 4% of their $120B net worth. They've almost certainly saved that much from favorable taxes and delaying climate change legislation, so it's been a pretty good deal for them.

May they burn in hell.