By The Signal Editorial Board
What the videos show depends on who’s watching. Thanks to confirmation bias, many people saw what they wanted to see. It seems like many people already have their minds made up before they click the “play” button.
Does it show a cold-blooded murderer wearing a government uniform? Or, does it show an officer acting in self-defense against a domestic terrorist? Both conclusions were drawn prematurely this week, from the left and the right.
But, as is often the case in stories like this, thanks to a cooperative left-leaning national media, the former characterization is the one that’s gained the most traction, which has only served to stoke the nation’s already simmering unrest, especially in Minneapolis, where this fatal shooting occurred.
What the videos show: A woman driving an SUV, later identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, parks in the middle of a street Wednesday and blocks the path of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who were in Minneapolis to apprehend criminal illegal immigrants there.
In a verbal encounter with officers, she and her wife are defiant and confrontational. The driver disobeys when an officer gives her a profanity-laced order to get out of the SUV. An officer is in the path of the vehicle as she apparently hits the gas, and he fires his weapon at her. She is fatally struck and the vehicle — which strikes the officer who fired the shots — accelerates away until it hits a parked car nearby.
Those are the facts, in a nutshell. More details can be easily observed in multiple videos online, including some from bystanders and one recorded by the officer who fired the shots.
Was it murder? Was the driver committing “domestic terrorism”? Those are conclusions that should be reached only after a complete investigation — and, perhaps, those questions might find their way to court at some point.
But that’s not how the reaction played out. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey immediately laid 100% of the blame at the feet of the ICE agent, in statements that only served to provoke an escalation of the existing unrest.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement, too, that also jumped the gun, calling the woman a domestic terrorist who intended to kill ICE officers, even though it’s impossible to know what her intent was.
Walz, perhaps seeking to divert attention from the $9 billion Somali day care fraud scandal plaguing the state under his watch, seized the opportunity to transform the shooting into political capital. Ironically, he and Frey welcome illegal immigrants and fraudsters in their sanctuary state but are calling for federal law enforcement’s expulsion. Backward logic, indeed.
Their “pour-gasoline-on-the-fire” messaging was reinforced by many members of an obliging national media, whose “news” reports — not labeled as commentary or opinion — largely drew conclusions characterizing the shooting as unjustified rather than just reporting the facts.
“The way that the media, by and large, has reported the story has been an absolute disgrace, and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day,” Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday.
Vance — who, to be fair, also drew some premature conclusions of his own — correctly pointed out that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of incidents involving protesters attempting to ram ICE officers with their vehicles, and in fact the officer who fired the fatal shots Wednesday required 33 stitches in his leg six months ago when he was struck in just such a ramming incident.
No matter who is to “blame” for this specific incident, either fully or partially, the death of Renee Nicole Good is tragic and should have been avoidable. It’s a common thread in so many fatal incidents involving law enforcement officers: Someone places himself or herself in a situation in which they encounter armed officers, and they fail to comply with those officers’ directions. That happened here. If Good and her wife had never set out to obstruct ICE officers who were, in fact, just doing their job, or if she had complied when instructed to exit her vehicle, she’d be alive today.
It also bears investigating whether the officer had reasonable options other than firing his weapon — although that question in cases like this is always a lot easier to answer by people who have the luxury of time to rewind and second-guess. Ask law enforcement officers about the split-second nature of such decisions. It’s very easy to Monday-morning-quarterback these scenarios.
Regardless, once the shooting occurred, if various politicians and media outlets had acted more responsibly in their reactions and coverage of this tragic incident, we wouldn’t have a nation even further on edge than it already was. A more measured, careful approach could have done wonders.
Oddly enough, no matter whether you agree with border czar Tom Homan on the government’s approach to immigration enforcement — and, as an aside, we do — it was still surprising for his voice to emerge as the most level-headed one on either the left or the right. Homan is, after all, justifiably known for his bluntness and bluster.
While he did say he saw nothing in the videos that led him to believe the ICE agents acted “outside of policy,” in an interview with the CBS Evening News the day after the shooting, he cautioned that it was too soon to draw conclusions about the incident.
“It’d be unprofessional to comment on what I think happened in that situation. Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation,” Homan said.
That’s the appropriate response.
If only Minnesota’s governor, the Minneapolis mayor and many others were equally cognizant of the need to react professionally, perhaps we wouldn’t be confronting an elevated threat of riots and violence against officers in the streets of that American city — and countless others.
