MAGA circle the wagons and fan the flames over wrongful shooting
Social media analyses of whether ICE shooting was justified largely miss the mark
The frenzied debate over the ICE shooting of a protestor in Minneapolis has frequently focused on irrelevant points. Those who think it was justified tend to focus on the fact that Renée Good had chosen to use her vehicle to impede a law enforcement operation, that she was resisting arrest, and that she was being reckless or malicious with the vehicle. The fact that the officer was in fact still in front of the vehicle when it began to move forward and he pulled his gun is enough for many of them to say her killing was justified. The ones with some humanity will express regret that it had come to that despite their belief that the shooting was legitimately in self-defense. But others cheer the bloodshed.
On the other side, many are so blinded by their left-wing commitment to absolute open borders and disdain for all things MAGA that any violence that erupts as a result of an ICE operation is going to be murder to them, regardless of the specific facts. Some of them wouldn’t even be interested in seeing a video to determine the positioning and motion of individuals and vehicles and the apparent trajectories of objects or timing of shots. For them, deportation operations are in themselves violence that begets violence, so the details don’t matter.
I’m someone who is not opposed to deporting people who are in the country illegally. It was clear to me that the Biden Administration used massive, unchecked immigration to try and skew demographics and benefit the Democratic Party electorally. That had to be stopped and order restored so that the country could have a rational, controlled process for immigration like any self-respecting country with a massive welfare state should have. I’m not saying that the Trump Administration has conducted a rational process. I haven’t followed it enough and don’t profess to know whether ICE’s operations have by and large been professionally conducted and not frequently excessive.
None of that matters, though, in determining whether Renée Good’s killing was justified. People are free to demonstrate against government action in this country. People are even free to try and obstruct law enforcement operations that they think are unjust, so long as they understand and accept that they will likely be arrested for doing so and will inherently be putting themselves, and possibly others, at risk. But none of that justifies an officer using deadly force against such a person unless at the moment the officer fires the shot he or someone else is perceived to be in imminent danger of death or serious injury from the person’s actions.
After watching both videos showing the sequence of the shooting, in slow motion and with audio, it’s clear to me that Good’s shooting was unjustified. Whatever threat to himself the officer could have perceived when he was still partially in front of the vehicle and drew his weapon, at the moment he took his first shot, the video and audio show he had cleared the corner of the car and that no part of his body remained in front of it. No other person was immediately in front of the vehicle and in danger. It had been clear from the moment she began to back up and then cut her wheels to the right to accelerate forward that Good was trying to flee imminent arrest, not find someone to run down.
Some have focused on the fact that the first shot entered through the windshield and not through the side window as evidence that the officer was still in front of the vehicle, and thus in danger, when he fired his first shot. But the video shows that was not the case. He was still close enough to the front of the car that his first shot passed through the windshield on its far left side, but his foot placement shows that his entire body was beside the vehicle at that point, not in front of it. Moreover, by that point the car was clearly pulling forward and to the right, not into the body of the officer.
Others will largely concede the above analysis of shots and positions but argue that the shooting was still justified because the time between when the officer was still in front of the vehicle and, theoretically at least, in danger, and the time when he had moved to the side of the vehicle and taken his first shot can all be measured in mere sub-seconds — frames of images — and does not last even a full second of time. In this view, it doesn’t matter that any theoretical danger to the officer had passed by the time he shot because it all happened so fast that it was beyond mental processing speeds.
This view to me is contradicted by the video evidence as well. The officer in question has a full view of the vehicle for the whole sequence of the events leading up to his pulling the trigger. He saw, as the video shows, that as the first officer approached the driver’s window and reached into it, Good was backing the vehicle up and cutting the wheels to position it for an escape forward and to the right. As she stops and begins her acceleration forward, the officer is indeed in front of her, but he’s already on the far left side (from the driver’s standpoint) and moving to the left-front corner of the vehicle and she’s beginning to cut her wheels sharply to the right to make an escape. I don’t believe anyone viewing the full sequence with an open mind would conclude that her intention was to mow down an officer, and I don’t think the officer who shot her thought she was trying to do that. Her intention, clearly, I think, was to resist arrest and to flee. And it’s not justifiable to shoot someone for that if you’re not in a position of imminent danger at the moment you shoot.
However foolish or reckless Renée Good may have been to do what she did, her shooting was not legally justifiable. I can’t guarantee a jury will find that way. News is coming in that the FBI is taking over the case and already denying evidence to the state. The way in which the highest federal officials, and even the president himself, rushed to judgment on this shooting and demonized the victim rather than making the usual careful statements that it would have to be fully investigated shows that the fix is likely in. The Trump Administration will not tolerate acknowledging a grave error if it could be used to criticize their deportation operations or ICE officers. They don’t even care that their overreach may be detrimental to their own cause in the long run.
Some will be presented with these facts and will nevertheless conclude that Renée Good got what was coming to her. They know she was the type of person they don’t like and whose politics are repugnant to them. They know she was defying authority and trying to disrupt a federal law enforcement operation that they supported, in a part of the country where a large number of people share her (warped, in their view) politics. They think her actions were beyond reckless, or were full-on malicious, and that she and others like her deserve to be demonized and, if need be, neutralized, as she was. And their political leadership is encouraging these views with flat-out lies about what happened.
MAGA were on higher ground when they pointed out the perverse discrepancies between the way BLM and George Floyd rioters were treated by prosecutors versus the way January 6th suspects were pursued relentlessly. By circling the wagons here to protect a cop emboldened by federal officials’ inflammatory “domestic terrorism” rhetoric to kill a citizen protestor, Trump officials are fanning flames that could ignite a real domestic upheaval of the type they pretend already exists. How that could be good for the country is beyond me.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.
Light the fuse. Own the blast.
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/light-the-fuse-own-the-blast