Renee Nicole Good, widow and mother of one, shot dead by ICE at age 37. The event was widely filmed. ICE will claim their agent was in danger, and perhaps he was, from her car. It's a needless tragedy nonetheless and the courts will no doubt sort it out. Anyway a person looks at it, masked man looking like an army of occupation are an abomination.
It was bound to happen.
Nearly since day one of the illegitimate Trump interregnum, Trump has used use ICE as if it was an uniformed, masked, Sturmabteilung, with that agency recruiting from the MAGA demographic. They were going to kill somebody, sooner or later.
The irony is, really, that they killed a white American, which means Americans might actually care about what happened.
The defense will be that the officer thought the car was going to run him over. Maybe he did. But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that ICE routinely gets into situations where it's hyperaggressive, something made easier by being dressed like soldiers, which they are not, and being masked. In the U.S. no policeman should ever be masked, and moreover, no policeman should look like a soldier. It makes people afraid, and people who are afraid, panic.
Officers can panic too, and of course, armed men, sooner or later are going to shoot somebody.
7 comments:
FAFO. It is a shame she's dead. However, it was entirely preventable and entirely her fault. Immigration law enforcement is there to enforce the law. It is entirely legal for them to do so. Doesn't matter what they "look like." Renee Nicole Good went there on her own volition to interfere with offices doing there legal job.
She put herself in harms way by being an antagonist, and then she put herself deeper in harms way by resisting authorities. Whether her intent was to flee or to kill the officer in front of her car is immaterial. She put the vehicle in gear and gunned the accelerator with the ICE agent directly in front of her car. He didn't have time to look at the direction her tires were pointed, and he just wanted to do his job and go home to his family. In fact, in another video that the left's media is not spreading, it appears she may have made contact.
I'm certain that if an officer is standing in front of your vehicle giving commands and you accelerate into that officer's body, lethal force by the officer is justified. I'm not a law enforcement officer, but if you accelerate your 2,000 pound missle at me, I'm probably going to shoot you.
It's time we stopped making excuses breaking the law.
Spelling errors above attributed to lack of coffee. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have lack of coffee related typos all the time, even with spell check.
David,
I find "FAFO" to be a disgusting and abhorrent way to handwave away the death of a human being, in fact bordering on celebration. An American citizen was shot and killed by masked Federal agents, is no part of that concerning to you?
Is it that any potential harm, real or imagined, and regardless of intent or consequence, that may face an officer warrants immediate execution? This base assumption IMO is way off base and dangerous.
>I'm certain that if an officer is standing in front of your vehicle giving commands and you accelerate into that officer's body, lethal force by the officer is justified.
Officers, or at real officers, are trained not to approach vehicles from the front. They are also trained not to fire at moving vehicles. If you blame the woman for intentionally putting herself into harm's way, does the officer not share any blame for doing the same? And regardless of what one thinks of ICE's immigration enforcement tactics, is stopping random cars and trying to drag driver's out of vehicles part of the scope of "doing their legal job?" It shouldn't be.
>I'm not a law enforcement officer, but if you accelerate your 2,000 pound missle at me, I'm probably going to shoot you.
Law enforcement officers should be held to a higher standard on these things than random civilians. As you say, they are there doing a job, but it is one that they signed up for knowing the risks and are being compensated for. As things are currently I would actually argue that is the opposite: If I go stand in front of your car, issue you commands and shoot you when you accelerate at me, I'm going to prison. I guarantee you this officer will never even be charged.
At least when a regular cop kills somebody, they can theoretically be held accountable. They wear name plates, have badge numbers, and have faces uncovered, and usually live in proximity to the place they patrol. ICE rolls into town faces covered to begin mass sweeping operations that any rational observer is able to predict would cause problems sooner rather than later. Regardless of your opinions on the Administration's immigration enforcement actions (full disclosure, I am not a fan) I think we should all hope as Americans that law enforcement actions are reasonable, measured, and in keeping with the laws and ideals of our Constitutions. This shooting was none of those things and taking to the web to bellow "Fuck Around and Find Out" is in poor taste at best.
The poor dead soul went to the area with the intent of disrupting law enforcement and was impeding the road -- a criminal act. That's FA. Ironically, anonymous opinions are the online equivalent of hiding your protest behind a mask.
And they were not stopping random cars. They approached her because she was using her car to block the road.
The NYT has a pretty good breakdown of the video footage of this event.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/watch
One thing to keep in mind about a video breakdown is that they don't take place in real time. The part of this, therefore, that's missed is the pace of events as people experience them. That's overall important here.
Having said all that, what seems to be the case is that the ICE officer drew his sidearm with no real need to do so. That was the first mistake, but I'll note that in some police departments, perhaps ICE being one officers are trained to draw their sidearms quite early. Be that as it may, the female driver was not an obvious armed threat at the time that he did so.
Things really got rolling when another officer attempted to open her car door, with the probable intent to pull her out of the car. ICE is extremely aggressive with people when many other trained departments would use restraint. At that point she cranks her wheel and is pretty obviously, form the angle filmed set to flea. I frankly might well have done the same thing. The officer that kills her is close to the car, but it appears to be turning. He shoots three times, which is common for modern police forces as they all carry 9mms as a rule. But the question is, was he in danger at the time?
The video doesn't support that he was. He probably was scared, however, and felt that he was, with his ability to accurately perceive what was gong on diminished due to adrenaline. If he's charged with anything, and he likely will not be, and if he's sued, which he undoubtedly will be, he'll likely prevail, the latter on a qualified immunity basis.
So what lessons are to be learned over this tragedy?
The first is that ICE overreacts, which gives rise to real questions about their training. Nearly any competent municipal force would have reacted differently, although some aggressive large city forces would have done the exact same thing.
Nonetheless, overall, ICE tends to come in like an invading army and they are not welcome everywhere, which contributes to that. They tend to act in a heavy handed fashion and they have an administration that backs this up. They've grown considerably over a short period of time and weren't in situations like this not all that long ago. They're put into situations where they aren't welcome and it's been known from the Boston Massacre, to Ludlow, to Kent State that this results in violence sooner or later. Most administrations would pause and take stock of what occurred, but that's not going to happen. This is unlikely to be the last violent encounter that we'll read about, and the reaction to ICE will undoubtedly increase.
Post a Comment