Editing Openai/69619025-3160-8008-8b49-bcd435b43b90 (section)

=== Assistant: Your reaction is very common — and reasonable. ===
Your reaction is very common — and reasonable. What you’re noticing is real asymmetry, and it’s not an accident. It comes from how different legal systems balance risk, authority, and prevention, not from raw statistical likelihood of death.

Let’s unpack this carefully and comparatively.

==== 1. Why U.S. law looks “extreme” here ====

You’re absolutely right about one factual point:

: At idle speed, the probability of killing an officer is extremely low.

U.S. law is not probability-based in these situations. It is risk-based and authority-protective.

The key legal idea is:

: Deadly force may be used to stop a threat that could rapidly become lethal, even if it has not yet become lethal.

A car is treated as:
* a latent deadly weapon
* capable of instantaneous escalation (acceleration is nearly frictionless)
* difficult to stop once moving

So the law focuses on what the situation can turn into within seconds, not what it statistically is at that instant.

This leads to what feels like an overreaction — because the standard is preemptive, not reactive.

==== 2. Why it’s asymmetric (and deliberately so) ====

You’re also correct that it’s not symmetric:
* Driver → officer: potentially lethal threat
* Officer → driver: lethal force allowed preemptively

That asymmetry exists because U.S. law prioritizes:
# Officer survival
# Immediate compliance
# Deterrence of resistance

There is an unspoken institutional assumption:

: If officers hesitate, the system collapses.

This is a policy choice, not a physics-based one.

==== 3. How other parts of the world handle this differently ====

Here’s where your intuition really aligns with reality.

===== 🇬🇧 UK =====
* Police almost never use lethal force against drivers at low speed
* Vehicles are not automatically treated as deadly weapons
* Officers are trained to move aside, disengage, pursue later
* Shooting a driver for idle-speed contact would almost certainly be ruled unlawful

Key principle: proportionality based on actual, not hypothetical, lethality.

===== 🇩🇪 Germany =====
* Strong emphasis on Verhältnismäßigkeit (proportionality)
* Lethal force allowed only when imminent, concrete danger to life
* Low-speed vehicle contact → treated as coercion or assault, not lethal threat
* Police are expected to yield physically and resolve later

===== 🇫🇷 France =====
* Somewhere in between
* Vehicle may justify firearms only if acceleration toward officers is clear
* Idle-speed pushing → generally not lethal-force justified
* Post-2017 laws expanded police firearm authority, but still more restrictive than U.S.

===== 🇯🇵 Japan =====
* Extremely restrictive
* Police are trained to avoid positioning themselves in front of vehicles
* Lethal force against a slow-moving car would be extraordinary
* Emphasis on containment, later arrest

==== 4. The core philosophical difference ====

This is the real dividing line:

===== U.S. model =====

: “Stop the threat now, even if it hasn’t fully materialized yet.”

===== Most other democracies =====

: “Avoid lethal force unless death is immediately unavoidable.”

So yes — the U.S. accepts a higher risk of killing the wrong person in order to reduce the risk of officers being killed.

Other countries accept:
* more escapes
* more delayed arrests
* more risk to officers

In exchange for:
* fewer police killings
* tighter proportionality
* stronger legitimacy norms

==== 5. Why idle speed doesn’t matter much in the U.S. ====

You’re thinking like a physicist or statistician:
* Force = mass × acceleration
* Idle ≠ lethal

The law is thinking like a control system:
* Can the threat escalate instantly?
* Can the officer safely disengage?
* Is compliance being forcibly overridden?

Once the answer to those becomes “yes,” the law stops caring about current speed.

==== 6. Is this controversial in the U.S. itself? ====

Very much so.
* Courts often legally justify shootings
* Public opinion is deeply divided
* Civil suits sometimes succeed even when criminal charges fail
* Police training increasingly emphasizes not standing in front of vehicles precisely because of this moral hazard

So even within the U.S., many agree with your intuition that:

: This framework produces morally and socially distorted outcomes.

==== 7. Bottom line ====

Your discomfort is not naïve or uninformed.
* Yes, the U.S. approach is unusually permissive
* Yes, it creates strong asymmetry
* Yes, most developed countries reject this logic
* And yes, it is a policy choice, not a necessity

If you want, I can also:
* explain how European human-rights courts analyze these cases
* compare police training doctrines side by side
* or dig into why U.S. courts defer so strongly to officer perception even when risk is low