As a former law enforcement officer and police ethics instructor, I am troubled by a recent article in The Economist, headlined: “American police killings are rising, even as murder rates fall.” Approximately 1,000 people are fatally shot each year by police in the United States. Some of the latest incidents involve law enforcement officers—federal and local—shooting at people in vehicles. Between 2015 and 2020, 7.3 percent of police shootings “involved incidents in which the person who was injured or killed was personally described as being armed with a vehicle” rather than another deadly weapon. I worry that this subset of shootings by law enforcement officers is increasing before our eyes.
On the morning of July 13, in the small city of Biddeford in Maine, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer stopped a vehicle driven by a 26-year-old Colombian man, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who, according to the office of U.S. Senator Angus King, was not the target of a warrant. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” (The next day, The New York Times has reported, the Trump administration “ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to halt most vehicle stops while carrying out operations across the country,” but only a few hours later Mr. Trump himself said there should be no pause on vehicle stops.)
The previous week, in Houston on the morning of July 7, as 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo drove his van to pick up workers for his construction business, he was stopped by ICE agents and fatally shot. A Mexican citizen who had lived in the United States for 35 years, Mr. Salgado, according to the D.H.S., rammed into an ICE vehicle and then “weaponized his vehicle” to run over an ICE agent, “resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”
These incidents recall the deadly shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 7; in that case, ICE also justified its use of lethal force as self-defense against a weaponized vehicle.
Local law enforcement agencies have also engaged in the questionable characterization of people fatally shot by police as having “weaponized” their vehicles. On June 14, a 1-year-old Black boy, Kohen Wiley, was fatally shot by a police officer in the small town of Senatobia, Miss. The local officers were responding to a call at a Walmart store, where two women who had allegedly shoplifted diapers—Kohen’s mother and a friend—were leaving the store, getting into a car and driving away in the parking lot. According to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation: “Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene.”
It is not the case that law enforcement officials are unconcerned by such uses of deadly force. In their 2025 empirical study of departmental deadly force policies regarding this subset of police shootings, John A. Shjarback, a criminologist, and Julie A. Ward, a nurse and public health scholar, observe: “Reducing police use of deadly force and preserving life is a common goal among many police executives, departments, and professional organizations; activist groups, researchers; and politicians.” As a theologian and ethicist, I share that objective, and as a Catholic I am troubled by the possibility of taking even one human life.
But such respect for human life seems absent in these recent shootings. “We are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child,” Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., posted on Instagram after the shooting in Mississippi. “That is not just bad policing; it is a moral collapse.”
To be fair, the Senatobia police officers have not justified their use of deadly force as necessary and proportionate to stopping shoplifters. Rather, like the ICE officers in the other recent shootings, they have invoked what is known as the “defense of life” standard for police to employ lethal force. But does this justification hold water in these instances?
The history of deadly force
When I first started working in law enforcement in 1984, officers could use deadly force against persons who had allegedly committed a felony and were trying to get away from being arrested. Historically, in the common law tradition, lethal force by law enforcement officers was sanctioned not only in “defense of life” but also to apprehend a “fleeing felon.” In the past, most felonies—such as murder, rape or escaping from prison—were serious and punishable by death. Hence, H. Leo Boatwright, writing in 1929, described shooting a fleeing felon as “the premature execution of the inevitable judgment.” By the late 20th century, when capital punishment was no longer the sentence for most felonies, this rationale lost its strength.
In 1985, this shift was reflected in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v. Garner. Edward Garner, a 15-year-old Black youth, was shot and killed by a Memphis police officer while trying to escape arrest after allegedly burglarizing a vacant house (only $10 was found in his possession). Although the pursuing officer did not believe that the teenager was armed or posed a threat, the Memphis Police Department justified his actions by invoking the “fleeing felon” standard.
The Supreme Court, however, held that a suspect’s interest in life should prevail, except where “it is necessary to prevent…escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” In another decision, Graham v. Connor, in 1989, the Supreme Court added the “objective reasonableness” standard to clarify when an officer has probable cause to believe that lethal force is necessary.
This standard surfaced again a year ago in another U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Barnes v. Felix. In this case, officer Roberto Felix Jr. pulled over a vehicle that had “outstanding toll violations” driven by Ashtian Barnes. During the stop, Mr. Barnes turned the ignition back on and the car began to move. Mr. Felix stepped onto the driver’s side door sill, ordering Mr. Barnes to stop. He then fired into the vehicle, killing Mr. Barnes. The U.S. Fifth Circuit used a “moment of threat” analysis and held that Mr. Felix’s use of deadly force to defend his life was objectively reasonable. However, in Barnes, the Supreme Court held that the “objective reasonableness standard” must meet the “totality of circumstances” test.
What this means is that preceding actions should be considered, including whether the officer places themselves in a situation that increases the danger, an action that can be characterized as “officer-created jeopardy.” This leads to the questions I have about the recent shootings. Did the local and federal law enforcement officers in the recent incidents in Senatobia, Biddeford, Houston and Minneapolis unnecessarily put themselves at risk? Might they instead have positioned themselves differently or moved out of the way and recorded the license plate for a follow-up visit at the driver’s address?
These are not new questions, and as the Shjarback and Ward study notes, since the early 1970s, many police departments have prohibited or restricted shooting at vehicles, because “while vehicles and their drivers can be considered deadly threats, shooting at them is dangerous and may unnecessarily jeopardize life and safety.” Indeed, as the authors explain, “such shootings are generally considered to be ineffective and high-risk, due to their potential to unintentionally strike passengers or bystanders with ricocheted or missed shots or strike the driver, rendering a 3,500-4,000-pound vehicle uncontrolled.”
Significantly, in their empirical study of 100 police departments in large cities, Shjarback and Ward found that “policy language constraining allowable actions that place prohibitions on officers shooting at moving vehicles—as well as obligating avoidant or preventative language instructing officers to not place themselves in the path of a vehicle and to move out of the way if possible—[was] associated with fewer of these specific types of police shootings.”
Of course, many of these policies can make allowance for circumstances when officers shoot in “defense of life” at vehicles, such as when drivers are using their vehicles to run over people or when an officer’s back is against the wall in a narrow alley with a vehicle barreling down on them.
To be sure, Shjarback and Ward recognize that “policy alone is insufficient to instill behavioral change,” that there is a need for training and retraining to reinforce commitment and adherence to the policy, as well as buy in among supervisory officers. Such ongoing practice should also address the worry some have expressed that stricter policies endanger police officers by making them too hesitant to use force.
I would add that law enforcement officers need to envision themselves again as peace officers in order to practice just policing. As Bernice King wrote on Instagram in response to the killing of Kohen Wiley: “Our charge is clear: until the sacredness of human life is the starting point of every police encounter, we must demand changes in training and work unrelentingly to reform policies around police accountability.”
In addition to addressing the related problems of the militarization of law enforcement, implicit racial bias and white privilege, as well as the lack of training for responding to mentally ill persons, police shootings at persons in vehicles should be dealt with urgently and stringently. Particular attention must be paid to ICE, where an aggressive campaign to quickly hire new officers has raised concerns about hiring and training standards. But all federal law-enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., send signals to local police departments about the acceptable use of deadly force. These agencies should raise the bar, not lower it.
[Also read: “The immigrants killed by ICE whose names we don’t remember”]
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