Cops Are Taught Not to Shoot Into Cars. ICE Keeps Doing It Anyway.

On Wednesday, a masked federal immigration officer killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and poet, shooting her at point-blank range in her car.

The incident, which has made headlines across the nation, is far from the first time immigration officers have shot someone in recent months. Good is one of at least nine people across the country who have been shot by immigration agents since September, the New York Times reports. There is something every case has in common: Everyone was in a vehicle at the time of the shooting.

“For decades now, officers have been trained that they can avoid being run over if they just don’t position themselves in a vehicle’s path of travel. “

The pattern raises serious concerns. For decades, cops have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City’s police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. All of the country’s largest 25 cities generally prohibit firing at vehicles as well, a Times investigation found in 2021.

Instead of shooting, law enforcement officers are taught to do something much safer for everybody involved: Get out of the way. But the federal agents enforcing President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign seem not to be following this rule, and are taking a far more dangerous path.

To better understand how cops are supposed to decide whether to use force against drivers, I spoke on Wednesday evening with Seth Stoughton, a former Florida police officer who is now a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. He is nationally recognized on the use of force by law enforcement and testified for the prosecution in the case against Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do law enforcement experts generally advise when it comes to potentially shooting at the driver of a moving vehicle?

I’m going to give you three different parts to answer that question. First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all. Under a 1985 case called Tennessee v. Garner, officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm. So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn’t be a shooting.

That leads to some sub-questions in the context of shooting at moving vehicles. The first combination of two of those is: Did the vehicle present an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? And, if so, why? For decades now, officers have been trained that they can avoid being run over if they just don’t position themselves in a vehicle’s path of travel. There are tactical manuals and articles that are very clear that describe stepping in front of or behind a vehicle as a very poor tactic—one that’s contrary to common sense. An officer cannot physically stop the vehicle from moving so there’s really no tactical benefit to stepping in front of the vehicle, but there’s a lot of tactical risk because it can hit you.

Maybe the officer didn’t have a choice. Maybe the vehicle turned towards them, or something like that. The next question we ask is whether the officer could have addressed the threat presented by that vehicle without shooting at the vehicle. That’s because shooting at a moving vehicle is not a reliably effective way of actually stopping that vehicle. If you imagine a vehicle driving toward you, shooting the driver is not going to cause that vehicle to stop. One, you might not actually incapacitate the driver. But even if you do, you’ve just gone from having a guided missile to having an unguided missile.

So, we have another layer of police training and guidance that says, don’t shoot at moving vehicles when the vehicle itself is the only weapon involved unless there is no other way to potentially address that threat. If you can move out of the way, it is better to move out of the way.

Could you narrate from your perspective what appears to be happening in the videos that have come out so far of the shooting on Wednesday in Minneapolis?

There’s at least one video that I’ve seen, but I don’t feel like I know enough about this one incident. I can tell you more broadly that I’ve seen a number of videos of ICE or CBP engaged in these operations that are not consistent with the traffic stop tactics that policing has developed in a pretty standardized way over the last 40 or 50 years. What a number of the recent videos have shown is unsafe and tactically unsound vehicle approaches. Vehicle extractions that are putting officers into dangerous positions that sound tactics could avoid.

There have been a number of cases where federal immigration agents seem to be very close to the front of the cars whose occupants they end up shooting—fatally or not. What could that show in terms of the training these agents are receiving?

Before Wednesday, one of the last ICE or CBP shooting videos that I saw was a federal car that drove in front of and cut off the car they were trying to stop. And then officers got out of their car. What that means is there’s at least one officer who is inevitably now in the subject vehicle’s path of travel.

Beyond that, as you see videos of officers approaching vehicles from in front of the car—or you see them moving around the car in front of the car—all of that puts officers in the potential position of being hit by a car.

If they used a different tactical approach, that risk just wouldn’t exist at all.

What impact have the restrictions on shooting at moving vehicles had in terms of saving lives and reducing uses of force?

The highest priority in policing is preserving the sanctity of human life. That obviously includes officers’ lives, but it’s also community members’ lives, and that includes criminal suspects. When officers put themselves into harm’s way, they often do so in a professionally appropriate way because doing so is necessary to help preserve the lives of community members. Think of an active shooter situation.

In other circumstances, it’s not professionally appropriate for officers to rush in and put themselves in harm’s way because there is a safer and more effective way of getting the mission done. If an officer is not threatened by a vehicle, then they don’t have to shoot the driver of that vehicle. Good tactics are not just about preserving officer safety. Good tactics are about preserving everyone’s safety.

This is so established in policing. I can send you articles in Police magazine, which is a popular media magazine for cops. In fact, here, hang on.

This is a 2006 article in Police called “Stay Out of the Way.” It’s talking about vehicle shootings involving police officers between 2001 and 2006: “There have been more than 17 officers injured and at least two officers killed as a result of incidents involving motor vehicles being used as weapons by suspects…Many of these incidents were the result of poor police tactics and training. For example, many of the officers involved in these incidents positioned themselves in the path of a motor vehicle in the early stages of an incident, apparently in an attempt to ‘control’ the suspect or prevent the suspect from leaving the scene. If you take nothing else away from this article, then remember this: Your flesh, bone, and muscle are no match against the mass and momentum of a car or truck.”

So, none of this is new.