Ep 4 Minneapolis Under Siege: Officer-Created Danger, Escalation, and the Freeze Frame is Gone

For years, courts often judged police shootings by freezing the frame at the final second. That rule is gone. In Episode 4, Judge Teske explains how the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Barnes v. Felix fundamentally changed the way courts must evaluate officer-involved shootings — in both civil and criminal cases. The Court rejected the “moment-of-threat” doctrine and replaced it with a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis, requiring judges and juries to consider the officer’s own conduct leading up to the use of force. This episode examines: • Officer-created danger and escalation • Why pre-seizure conduct now matters • How positioning, commands, and disengagement factor into constitutional analysis • The facts of Barnes v. Felix and why the Court rejected the old rule • How this new standard affects criminal removal and the Supremacy Clause immunity Using the Minneapolis shooting as context — and video evidence as sequence, not snapshot — Episode 4 explains why courts can no longer ignore what happened before the trigger was pulled. This episode does not decide guilt. It explains how the law now requires the analysis to be done. Because the Constitution does not operate in a freeze-frame.