# Officer-Created Jeopardy **Officer-created jeopardy** is the legal and tactical term for a situation where a police officer's own choices put them in danger, and they then use deadly force to escape it. The textbook example is an officer who steps into the path of a slow-moving car, then shoots the driver because the car is "coming at" them. The question the doctrine asks is simple: **when an officer manufactures the threat, does the threat still justify the killing?** Under the dominant federal framework, the answer has usually been yes. That gap between common sense and constitutional law is why the concept matters, and why it sits at the center of the 2026 immigration-enforcement shootings, above all the [[Renée Good Killing]]. ## The Legal Frame **The baseline — [[Graham v. Connor]] (1989).** Excessive-force claims are judged under the [[Fourth Amendment]] standard of "objective reasonableness," viewed from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than with "the 20/20 vision of hindsight," with allowance for split-second judgments. *Graham* did not say how far back in time a court should look. **The moment-of-threat rule.** Several federal circuits, most prominently the Fifth, answered that question narrowly: a court looks only at the instant the officer fired. Anything the officer did in the seconds before — stepping in front of the car, jumping onto it, escalating a minor stop — was legally invisible. Law professor Cynthia Lee's 2021 *George Washington Law Review* article documented the circuit split and argued for "broadening the time frame" so juries could weigh the officer's whole sequence of choices, on the theory that counting antecedent conduct gives officers an incentive not to create deadly confrontations in the first place. **[[Barnes v. Felix]] (May 15, 2025).** A unanimous Supreme Court, per [[Elena Kagan]], rejected the moment-of-threat rule and required courts to assess the **totality of the circumstances**, including events leading up to the shooting. But the Court **explicitly declined to decide** whether an officer's creation of their own jeopardy makes the force less reasonable, because the lower courts hadn't addressed it. A concurrence by [[Brett Kavanaugh]] (joined by Thomas, Alito and Barrett) stressed the dangers of traffic stops and treated a driver's flight as a sign of possible serious crime. **The remand shows the limit.** On September 18, 2025, the Fifth Circuit again ruled for the officer — who had stepped onto the door sill of Ashtian Barnes's moving car over an unpaid toll — finding the force reasonable and leaning heavily on the Kavanaugh concurrence. So *Barnes* widened the lens, but it did not require any court to count the officer's own conduct against him. Officer-created jeopardy remains an **open question at the Supreme Court**. ## Policy Says What the Constitution Doesn't The strongest prohibitions live in agency policy, not constitutional law: | Agency | Policy | Relevant language | |---|---|---| | [[Department of Homeland Security]] | Policy Statement 044-05 (Rev. 1), Feb 6, 2023 | Officers "should… avoid intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force"; firing at the operator of a moving vehicle is prohibited unless deadly force is otherwise justified | | [[CBP]] | Use of Force Policy 4500-002A, Jan 2021 | Officers "should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle or use their body to block a vehicle's path" | | Department of Justice | Updated use-of-force policy under [[Merrick Garland]], May 20, 2022 | No shooting at a moving vehicle unless it threatens death or serious injury and "no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle" | Two caveats keep this from being a clean rule. First, courts generally hold that breaking a department policy does not by itself make force unconstitutional; the policy is evidence, not the standard. Second, the DHS policy does not create a duty to retreat. The policy is set and enforced by the same agency whose officers it constrains. When that agency's leadership publicly defends a shooting before any investigation, the policy constraint has no one left to enforce it. ## The Police-Side Critique Use-of-force trainers and police defense counsel treat officer-created jeopardy as a hindsight trap. Von Kliem of Force Science argued in October 2024 that under the theory officers "will be held criminally liable—not for their actual actions—but for what others, with the benefit of hindsight, believe they could have done differently," and that it ignores how human performance breaks down under stress. The counter-position (Lee, and police-management writers who separate *legal* force from *necessary* force) is that tactical positioning is not a split-second decision at all. It is the choice made *before* the split second, and it is exactly the kind of choice training can change. ## Case Study: Renée Good (January 7, 2026) During [[Operation Metro Surge]], ICE officer [[Jonathan Ross]] shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis. The video record, as analyzed by multiple news organizations: - Ross was standing at the **front-left** of Good's Honda Pilot, filming on his phone. - Good shifted into drive and **steered right, away from him**. - Ross fired three shots in under a second. The first went through the windshield and the next two went through the **driver's-side window** of a vehicle that was turning away. News video analyses concluded he was not run over. This is the canonical officer-created-jeopardy fact pattern — and it is also a direct collision with the DHS 2023 policy language above. **The official narrative inverts the concept.** Rather than asking whether the officer created the danger, the administration assigned the jeopardy to the driver. [[Kristi Noem]] said the agent was hit by the vehicle, DHS claimed he suffered internal bleeding, and a DHS spokesperson called the incident "an act of domestic terrorism." [[JD Vance]] called Good's death "a tragedy of her own making." The phrase is the mirror image of officer-created jeopardy: *victim*-created jeopardy, asserted before any investigation. **Why the doctrine matters to accountability here.** The Justice Department declined to open a civil-rights investigation, and [[Todd Blanche]] said DOJ would not open a criminal one, which leaves the state. [[Mary Moriarty]] (Hennepin County) and [[Keith Ellison]] opened their own investigation. A state prosecution of a federal officer runs into **Supremacy Clause immunity** (see [[Supremacy Clause]]), which protects a federal agent only if he acted reasonably and lawfully in doing his federal job. That puts Ross's pre-shooting positioning, and the DHS rule he appears to have broken, at the center of any immunity fight. After months of litigation over withheld evidence, federal authorities turned over body-camera footage, officer statements and the vehicle itself to Hennepin County and the Minnesota BCA by mid-July 2026. As of the most recent reporting verified here (Minnesota Reformer, 2026-07-13), no charging decision had been announced. ## The Vehicle-Shooting Pattern The car is the signature officer-created-jeopardy scenario because a vehicle only becomes a "weapon" once someone stands in its path. The pattern recurs across the second-term enforcement surge: - **[[ICE Shooting of Ruben Martinez]]** (South Padre Island, March 15, 2025). Agents say Martinez's car struck an agent. His passenger's sworn declaration says the officer appeared to position himself in front of the car rather than being hit by it. Contested, and it ended in a grand-jury no-bill. - **[[Renée Good Killing]]** (Minneapolis, January 7, 2026). The case above. - *Barnes v. Felix* itself was a vehicle case: an officer stepped onto the sill of a car pulling away and fired. The broader Minneapolis context, including the non-vehicle [[Alex Pretti Killing]], is on [[ICE Minneapolis Killings]]. ## KB Significance **The accountability gap is structural.** Constitutional doctrine lags agency policy. Agency policy is enforced internally. Federal criminal and civil-rights enforcement is controlled by the same administration defending the shooting. Officer-created jeopardy marks the exact point where those three layers fail at once: the officer's choice that caused the death is the choice the doctrine is least equipped to judge. **Narrative as pre-emption.** "A tragedy of her own making" is not just spin; it is a legal theory stated in advance. It frames the driver's movement, rather than the officer's positioning, as the proximate cause, which is the question a court or jury would later have to decide. ## Doctor Paradox Blog Content - **[The killing of Renee Good](https://doctorparadox.net/renee-good-murder/)** (January 18, 2026) — argues Ross broke DHS policy by putting himself in the path of a moving vehicle, had his phone in one hand when he drew, and showed no apparent fear despite claiming it. It is the officer-created-jeopardy argument made before the vault had a name for it. ## Open Questions - Will the Supreme Court take up the question *Barnes* left open, and would the current Court count officer-created jeopardy against the officer at all, given the Kavanaugh concurrence's four votes? - Will Hennepin County charge Ross, and how will the federal-officer immunity fight treat his positioning? - Does DHS still apply Policy Statement 044-05 as written, or has it been revised under the second Trump administration? *(Not verified — check before citing.)* ## See Also - [[Renée Good Killing]] · [[ICE Minneapolis Killings]] · [[Alex Pretti Killing]] · [[ICE Shooting of Ruben Martinez]] - [[Operation Metro Surge]] · [[ICE]] · [[CBP]] · [[Department of Homeland Security]] - [[Barnes v. Felix]] · [[Graham v. Connor]] · [[Fourth Amendment]] · [[Supremacy Clause]]