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.
Snelling added that the agency later discovered Thompson had warrants out for her arrest and the autopsy found illicit drugs in her system.
Man, I hate it when the cops bring up this irrelevant bullshit. All they’re trying to do is make the victim look less sympathetic, and make themselves look less bad in comparison. Even if the officers had known about the warrants and drugs, these facts don’t make it okay to gun a woman down.
Yeah they had no reasonable suspicion to target her.
Remember when a cop broke into Botham Jean’s apartment and shot him in the face while he was sitting on his own couch eating ice cream? Remember when afterward they had a press conference to show off the <1 gram of marijuana they found just in case that made him a bad person who deserved to die.
Running from the police with an active arrest warrant while your high is pretty relevant lol
Afaik, running from the police also isn’t a reason for them to gun someone down.
It’s not irrelevant at all. It’s likely the reason she didn’t identify herself, which in turn led the police to believe she was their robbery suspect. Outstanding warrants and drugs wouldn’t justify gunning her down, but a robber is much more likely to go on and hurt or kill someone.
They murdered her because they thought she was a shoplifter???
In what universe did it become ok to murder anyone for shoplifting???
#ACAB always and forever
Doesn’t matter how small the crime is or how unthreatening the suspect is. Failure to comply is cause for any and all escalation.
We heard about that first when it happened, and nothing at all was done when it was just some old lady hurt. (edit: Even with bodycam) THEN the laughing video came out a few days later and THEN the public outcry ramped up enough they had no choice. Only then was there any action against those officers.
I don’t like “the shoot first, ask questions later” mentality. I always thought a cop should be a white knight. They need to be ready to throw down their lives to save someone. A us vs them mentality, the fact the police are people and some have families and their own wants and needs will mess with anyone’s line of thinking. Police have to be ready to risk opening the door to confirm a dangerous suspect before they use force to try and save themselves.
Then maybe we should have actual standards for who becomes a cop? But that’d leave us with no cops. Problem solved?
💀
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
