Maryland. Chicago. Phoenix. Los Angeles. Minneapolis.
And now Portland.
A day after a federal immigration agent fatally shot a woman in her vehicle in Minneapolis, federal agents in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and a woman in their car during a “vehicle stop” Thursday afternoon. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the driver tried to run over the officers.
The shooting in Portland was at least the 10th since September by federal agents who are part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — and all 10 involved people who were in their vehicles.
At least two people, including the Minneapolis woman, died in the shootings.
Federal officials said the shootings were justified because the vehicles had been “weaponized” and the officers’ lives were in danger. According to the Justice Department, officers can only shoot at a car in two circumstances: if the person in the car threatens the officer or others with “deadly force by means other than the vehicle,” or if the driver operates the vehicle in a manner that threatens serious injury or death.
In many cases, at the heart of debates over police use of force is the question of whether the driver’s actions posed a serious threat.
In the case of the Minneapolis shooting, a Times analysis of video of the incident, from multiple angles, raised questions about the official claim that the driver posed a deadly threat. Instead, the woman appeared to hijack the police car.
“Look at the wheels of the car, they’re turning to the right, and all he has to do is move out of the way,” Geoffrey Alpert, an expert on police use of force at the University of South Carolina, said this week after watching the Minneapolis video at the request of The New York Times. “It moves the wheels all the way to the right.”
Most of the nation’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, have banned police officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in very rare circumstances, such as when a driver shoots at police or a terrorist drives into a crowd. Police cadets are often not trained to shoot at moving vehicles, and authorities have long warned that the practice risks hitting innocent bystanders.
The Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit organization that studies law enforcement policies, puts it this way in a 2023 article: “Shooting at a moving vehicle is not an effective way to stop it. There is the challenge of hitting a moving target, and the risk that an errant bullet will hit an unintended target, such as a bystander. There is also a risk that if the driver is struck, he or she will lose control of the vehicle.”
Law enforcement officers have been killed by drivers using their vehicles as weapons. Five officers died this way in the first seven months of 2024, according to the most recent FBI data.
This week, following the Minnesota shootings, Xochitl Hinojosa, a former Justice Department spokesperson under the Biden administration, wrote on X that in 2022, the department updated its use of force policy for the first time in 20 years. She wrote that the new policy “included a requirement to provide medical assistance and clarification on how firearms cannot be discharged into a moving vehicle in most circumstances.”
Shaila Dewan reports contributed.
