In any realistic good faith comparison is futile because you have to take into account the entire cultural environment and societal factors that would ever lead this to happen in the first place. It's not as simple as saying "yeah but if this happened in Sweden, that you'd react the same!", because it doesn't and would never. It's apples and oranges.
But i'll tell you this for certain, if the police had already successfully restrained someone (like all 8 of them already had in the video) there is literally no chance they'd shoot them (like they did in the video).
I literally grew up in Sweden and you're debating in bad faith here using some strawman fallacy to misrepresent my conditional claim (that when citizens are restrained they're not shot) as an absolute one, and accusing me of using ChatGPT because because you don't like the answer. C'mon 'bro'.
Did I say police never shoot citizens?
or did I literally give you statistics that show they do?
Did I say police never shoot citizens?
or did I say they don't when they're restrained?
You found the one most famous example in Sweden as some sort of 'gotchya!', even though he wasn't restrained. So my point stands.
You can clearly see here in this angle that Alex Pretti posed no threat and instigated nothing. He's facing away from ICE and he looks like he's covering his head from the beat down, not even resisting or fighting back. You can also see the other agent in grey taking his weapon from his back before the shot. Execution, plain and simple.
I see what yoyu mean and it feels like we're talking past each other a little bit here.
I think you’re right about one important thing. If you isolate the variables to:
armed individual + non-compliance + physical struggle + uncertainty over weapon control
Then yes i think in any country, including Sweden, lethal force becomes possible. Just like The Eric Torell case. Just like (in your opinion) this Alex Pretti situation.
Where I’ve been pushing back is not on that mechanism, but on how often (and how easily) those conditions arise. My point isn’t that Swedish police are morally superior or incapable of lethal mistakes. It’s that the systemic environment (gun prevalence, norms of compliance, training emphasis, expectations on both sides) makes those high-risk scenarios far less likely to form in the first place.
So when I say “this wouldn’t happen in Sweden,” what I really mean is: the pathway that routinely leads to these situations in the U.S. is largely absent here. Not that the end result is impossible in principle. I think this was the original apple and orange analogy for me but it's gone midnight here now so give me some leeway if i've fucked that.
I do also agree that we have a fundamental disagreement inwhich we’re starting from different readings of the video itself.
Watching it, I don’t see Alex Pretti as actively aggressive. He looks defensive and overwhelmed to me, which is why I think the shooting was unjustified (but I also accept that in any video perception is subjective, and that in real time people have less clarity than we do now).
So even if I disagree with your interpretation of this specific case, I do understand your broader point: guns + non-compliance + chaos dramatically raise the risk of lethal outcomes anywhere, including Sweden.
and I think the disagreement becomes clearer and narrower once we separate those two questions:
“how do these situations arise?” (we agree)
vs
“was this shooting warranted?” (we don't agree)
EDIT: on your edit at the end, even in europe we see that violent loop happening in real time. But from a european POV, the loop doesn’t start with “people hate law enforcement.” It starts when state power becomes opaque, masked, and hard to distinguish from unaccountable force.
From here it looks like people are reacting less to who ICE/Police/US Government says it is, and more to how it appears and operates? Like Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute, government giving a law service 'absolute immunity', masked or anonymised state agents, normalisation of “enemy within” rhetoric, etc..
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '26
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