The Inner Monologue

There is a terrible irony in the way cars figure into America’s recurring story of police violence. The car is the quintessential symbol of American freedom—mobility, independence, a life lived on open highways. Yet again and again, a vehicle becomes a coffin when police officers, armed with a hair-trigger sense of danger, fire into them. And the evidence later shows: the driver or passenger posed no mortal threat. The only “crime” was being in a car, near an officer trained to see menace in every movement.

A Pattern We Cannot Unsee

Think of Jordan Edwards, 15 years old, leaving a party in Texas in 2017. He was a passenger, not the driver. The car was moving away from police, not toward them. Yet an officer opened fire, killing him. The police narrative—“the car was backing aggressively toward us”—collapsed under the weight of body camera footage. In a rare instance, the officer was convicted. But the damage? Permanent. Jordan’s parents buried their son.

Or Paul O’Neal in Chicago, 2016. Eighteen years old, unarmed, fleeing in a stolen car. Police unloaded their weapons in violation of department policy. They hit him after he exited the car, shot in the back. Officers’ body cameras captured not heroism but panic: “They’re gonna crucify us,” one officer muttered. They knew, even in the moment, that the narrative was untenable.

Or Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, pursued by dozens of police in Cleveland in 2012. A car backfiring during a chase was misinterpreted as a gunshot. What followed was a fusillade: 137 bullets, one officer climbing onto the hood to fire 49 shots directly into the windshield. Neither Russell nor Williams had a weapon. Their car became a killing chamber for no crime greater than a mistaken noise.

The Justification Game

In nearly every case, the initial police statement leans on one phrase: “The car was coming toward us.” That one line has become the talisman for justifying lethal force. And yet, in case after case, body cam or dashcam evidence shows the opposite—the car was fleeing, parked, or moving in a way that posed little risk. The car-as-weapon narrative is powerful because it requires no evidence, just fear. An officer says, “I thought it would hit me,” and a life is over. The threshold of proof is subjective belief, not objective threat.

The law amplifies this. Courts have repeatedly ruled that officers may shoot if they reasonably perceive danger, even if that perception is later proven false. This creates a system where fear is currency, and officers are the only ones allowed to mint it. In practice, this means unarmed teenagers, mentally ill adults, or tired drivers can be executed because someone with a badge says they “felt endangered.”

Race, Class, and the Disposable Car

There is no avoiding the racial undertone. Most of the names in these tragedies are Black or brown: Jordan Edwards, Paul O’Neal, Malissa Williams, Marcellis Stinnette. Even Zachary Hammond, a white teen killed in South Carolina, was the exception that proved the rule. His case only gained traction because it forced some Americans to see the same violence outside the usual racial framework. The common denominator isn’t just race—it’s disposability. These were people whose lives the system valued less than the officers’ comfort in a split second of fear.

Cars play into this disposability too. A moving car is easier to dehumanize than a body. Police aren’t shooting a boy, they’re shooting a vehicle. The windshield becomes a stand-in for a weapon, and so long as the car can be described as “in motion,” officers can argue they feared for their lives. The victim vanishes behind the steel and glass, reduced to an object in motion rather than a human being.

Accountability Is Not Justice

Occasionally, as with Jordan Edwards, accountability arrives. An officer is convicted. More often, families receive settlements: millions of dollars that city governments quietly pay out, a line item in a budget for wrongful death. Yet money is not justice. A life isn’t restored by a check. Settlements are hush money, paid to keep the machinery moving without reform. The officers, if fired, often resurface in another department. The cycle resets. The fear is institutionalized, the rules unchanged.

A Different Kind of Courage

It takes almost no courage to fire a gun into a car. It takes profound courage to withhold fire, to wait, to think, to risk being wrong in the service of being humane. That’s the courage we lack. We ask police to be warriors, not guardians, and then we pretend to be shocked when they treat every encounter as a battlefield.

Imagine if the default assumption was different: that a driver trying to flee a traffic stop is not a killer but a frightened kid, a panicked person, or simply someone who does not want to deal with the police. Imagine if officers were trained and expected to disengage rather than escalate. The technology exists—helicopters, license plate readers, GPS trackers. The old excuse, “We had no choice but to shoot,” is a choice, not a fact.

Closing the Gap Between Myth and Reality

The myth is that cars are weapons. The reality is that police turn cars into coffins. The myth is that officers act in split-second necessity. The reality is that, again and again, those seconds reveal bad judgment, poor training, and unchecked fear.

Until that gap is closed, until we stop accepting “the car was coming toward me” as a blank check for killing, more families will bury their children, more cities will quietly cut settlement checks, and more officers will walk away untouched.

The next Jordan Edwards is already out there—just a kid, in a car, trying to live a normal life. And the next officer’s fear is already rehearsing its lines.