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

Immigration agents have shot at least nine people since September. All of them have been in cars.

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A bullet hole in the windshield of the vehicle driven by Renée Good when she was killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.Ben Hovland/AP

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On Wednesday, a masked federal immigration officer killed Renée 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.

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“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.

THIS YOUTUBER’S CROSS-COUNTRY ‘SELF DRIVING’ ROAD TRIP SHOWS WHAT YOU SHOULDN’T DO WITH A TESLA
BY OLIVIA RICHMAN DEC. 13, 2025 9:45 AM EST

Bearded Tesla Guy / YouTube
YouTuber Justin Demaree, known as the Bearded Tesla Guy, decided to test his Tesla Model Y’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system on a cross-country road trip — and it didn’t take long for the trip to become rocky. Demaree and a friend planned to drive — or let the car drive — from Orlando to San Diego, but chaos ensued just 60 miles into the challenge. Right at the start of the video, the Tesla Model Y can be seen flying at 70 miles per hour over a massive piece of metal in the road, which resulted in some concerning damage. 

After hitting the object on the highway, the Model Y lost a sway bar bracket, and some plastic on the bumper was damaged. Demaree says that he later learned that the battery had a cell imbalance that left the duo heading to a service center in Arizona — the report concluded that the battery was having issues before the highway incident, but did FSD’s inability to slow down ahead of hitting the large object make it worse? 

Was the Bearded Tesla Guy at fault for hitting the metal ramp?

Bearded Tesla Guy / YouTube
Demaree’s cross-country journey at the hands of Tesla’s FSD mode has raised some interesting questions. A lot of the comments on the previous video revolved around his run-in with the police — many wanted to know why Demaree didn’t admit to the police that he hit the large piece of metal because he was letting FSD take over. Why was that? 

As more self-driving cars hit the streets, states are scrambling to create new legislation. This includes regulations on the vehicles themselves and penalties for drivers who use FSD recklessly (even completely driverless cars won’t be safe from tickets and penalties as states update their laws). If a self-driving car gets into an accident, the driver can be held legally responsible along with their car, as was the case with the death of Elaine Herzberg, the first woman to be killed by a self-driving vehicle. 

Studies surrounding the issue state that humans may be putting too much trust into their self-driving cars. Or in Demaree’s case, purposefully ignoring potential dangers. Even Tesla itself warns that it’s the driver’s responsibility to stay alert and drive safely while operating an FSD car.

Its Model 3 manual states: “Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may not detect all objects and, especially when cruising over 50 mph, may not brake/decelerate when a vehicle or object is only partially in the driving lane or when a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary or slow-moving vehicle or object is in front of you.” 

Is Tesla’s Full Self-Driving covered by any warranty?

Brian Gallegos/Shutterstock
In addition to facing possible legal issues, it appears that Demaree would have needed to cover any damage caused while using the FSD mode. The damage caused by the highway incident racked up $22,000 at the service station, including $17,000 for a new battery — a visit that Demaree didn’t record for us to see. The YouTuber had taken a detour to the nearest Tesla dealership when his battery kept showing concerning errors — it was believed that running over the large piece of metal exacerbated existing issues with the faulty battery. 

Demaree got lucky in that the battery may have had a pre-existing cell imbalance, and was still under Tesla’s mileage warranty. If that hadn’t been the case, Tesla would likely not have covered any issues caused by using Full Self-Driving mode. While Tesla may cover damage caused by autopilot failure, it won’t cover damage caused while not following Tesla’s guidelines. 

Tesla emphasizes that drivers must be “fully alert” while using FSD, allowing them to take over right away if road conditions require intervening. It would probably be a very difficult task to get Tesla to cover any damage caused by purposefully running into a giant metal object at full speed as you test FSD’s capabilities. 

Tesla’s FSD is still a work in progress, and has suffered many setbacks, resulting in the company’s self-driving taxi falling way behind the competition. FSD isn’t perfect, and has caused everything from minor traffic concerns to passenger deaths, but Tesla plows on regardless. You may want to try it out in a more reliable Tesla model, however.

Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/2048227/tesla-model-y-fsd-cross-country-drive-damage-cost-youtuber-justin-demaree/