Good was, of course, the woman who was shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. The incident is pitting Democrats against Republicans, as usual, and is playing out on television screens across America. We, the people, are being asked to decide if the ICE officer needlessly shot Good, or if she really did attack him, thus justifying his fatal reaction.
I’ve seen every video that’s been released, and here’s my conclusion: Good did stalk ICE for hours. Then she tried to block the road with her SUV in order to make it harder for ICE to do whatever they were there to do. She did refuse orders to leave peacefully. She did graze the ICE officer with the SUV, although it appears not to have been intentional, and she certainly didn’t “run him over,” as Kristi Noem alleged. Under the circumstances, as I understand it, the officer had a right to shoot her.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have. He could have shot out her tires. He could have let her drive away; she obviously wouldn’t have gotten very far before being apprehended. But these coulda-woulda-shoulda scenarios are never helpful. The fact is that he did shoot, and Good is dead.
Liberals are doubling down on criticizing ICE, and thus the Trump administration. Zohran Mamdani has called it “murder.” I think that’s a mistake. What I saw in the videos is being seen by everyone else, and I believe most people will come to the same conclusion as I did. Renee Good was wrong. What she did was illegal. She should have exited her vehicle when asked. If she had had an ounce of common sense, she would have known in advance that her actions endangered her own life. She should have known that the rule with people like ICE is FAFO. Good fucked around and found out. (By the way, I said the same about Ashli Babbitt. This isn’t a left-right thing, it’s a right-wrong thing.)
This is not to say everything is clear about this incident. The FBI, in refusing to allow Minnesota legal officials to participate in the investigation, is making a huge mistake. By asserting exclusive dominion over the investigation, they open themselves to the charge that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her master, Trump, will be self-appointed judge, prosecutor, and jury. This is a charge that will be taken seriously by the American people, who crave justice. The Trump regime is already widely suspected of being one-sided when it comes to these investigations; no serious observer will believe that an investigation consisting solely of Trump administration officials can be objective and honest. And by claiming, as JD Vance did yesterday, that ICE officers have “absolute immunity” when it comes to shooting people, the Trump regime reinforces the suspicion that nazified practices and Gestapo brutality are allowable norms. They’re not.
It’s sad. If the FBI were to allow the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (MBCA) to work alongside the FBI in the investigation, it’s difficult to imagine MBCA not coming to the same conclusions I did. But this Republican regime, headed by a paranoid megalomaniac, hates Democrats so much they’re willing to throw legal norms out the window, in order to achieve their objectives. This will prove to be their fatal mistake.
It pains me to write these words. I hate agreeing with MAGA world. But in this case, they’re right. Extremists, like Renee Good, really need to stop their disobedience of the law, and they need to obey legitimate police commands when given. I’ve always felt this way. I felt and said the same things when Scott Olsen was hit during that Occupy Oakland protest in 2011. I agreed with Scott’s original motives. But he FAFO’d, and got beanbagged as a result of failure to obey a warning to disperse.
Peaceful protest is praiseworthy, but at some point, protesters have to yield before the force of security officers. Perhaps they feel that they’re above the law when it comes to standing up for human rights. They’re entitled to that belief, but they’re not above the law. No one is.
Steve Heimoff