Eric the Blue

Regarding the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, it’s clear that people are going to believe (or say that they believe) whatever it pleases them to believe. It seems a short step from there to the claim that the shooting is essentially a “Rorschach Test” and that objective truth concerning the event doesn’t exist: some will “interpret” the evidence this way, some that way, and there are only “interpretations,” no truth. If you think that’s a crock (and I do), this frame-by-frame analysis of the available video evidence by the New York Times, which is augmented by the synchronization of different videos, is invaluable. I’d encourage anyone to watch it.

The Times’s narration tries to play it down the middle, but the evidence plainly contradicts the Trump administration’s account. The shooter, Jonathan Ross, was not “run over” or even “struck.” At most–and I doubt this–he was grazed by a slow moving vehicle as he leaned forward to shoot. Nor did Good try to run him over. If she had wanted to, she easily could have, because he walked around her car and was for a second or two a short distance in front of the middle of her front bumper. I doubt that’s what they teach you to do at Cop School, but that’s what he did. During the moments when Ross was most vulnerable, Good, instead of moving rapidly forward to run him over, put her SUV in reverse and backed up a few feet. She shifted to drive as Ross’s counter-clockwise circumnavigation of her vehicle reached the area of her left front corner. Then, turning the wheel sharply to the right, away from Ross, she began to move forward as he began shooting, once through the left edge of the windshield and then twice through the driver’s side window. There is always open space visible between his feet and legs and the SUV. While shooting, the cell phone with which he’d been recording Good struck her car and made a thudding sound that some have claimed was caused by the vehicle striking him. The mortally wounded Good stopped steering and her SUV crashed into a parked car at the side of the road. Ross, who according to the government had been “run over,” suffering “internal bleeding to the torso,” is seen walking normally in Portland Avenue immediately after the shooting. He doesn’t appear hurt, does not ask for help, and none of his colleagues seem concerned about his well being. They soon drive off. Though the government claims he required treatment at a local hospital, there is no record of this.

The Times’s narration mentions that Ross put himself in danger by walking in front of Good’s car, and that this runs counter to common law enforcement training. Others have pointed out that his organization, the Department of Homeland Security, has a policy on use of force that emphasizes de-escalation and requires agents to deliver medical assistance when necessary. The video evidence indicates these were two additional failures. In subsequent encounters between ICE agents and Twin Citians who record and jeer at them, the agents have asked whether they haven’t “learned the lesson” of what happened to Good. But the official story about what happened to Good is that she was shot because she ran over an agent. That agents think people standing along streets blowing whistles and cursing them need to “learn the lesson” suggests to me that the problem wasn’t that Ross had been hurt or feared that he might be. The problem was that Good wasn’t afraid enough, and her partner, especially, a little too mouthy. The “lesson” the agents have in mind is: You all have to stop being mean to us, or we’ll shoot. It’s evident that they have a license to do that. Nothing is going to happen to Ross, but the DOJ is investigating Good, her partner, Minnesota’s governor, and Minneapolis’s mayor, which is why several of the top dogs in the local US Attorney’s Office resigned. Not every government worker connected to this saga is without honor.