There will be more Renee Goods
Poorly trained armed men acting with impunity will lead to tragedy.
I had originally planned for today’s Infinite Scroll to be a fun, jaunty post about a Gen Alpha video game. That plan got tossed out halfway through the week, and instead I ended up writing for The Dispatch about how ICE shot and killed a 37 year old US citizen in Minnesota.
The Dispatch is normally paywalled, but for subscribers here’s a gift link to the article. Your regularly scheduled Infinite Scroll posts will be back this weekend.
On Wednesday, a woman named Renee Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis.
There are a lot of things you could say about the shooting. You could say that it’s tragic in the plainest sense of the word: A woman is dead. You could point out that it is extremely unclear why ICE officials were stopping her in the first place, or what legal authority they were exercising at that moment. You could point out how unnecessary the entire incident was, how eyewitness accounts emphasize that Good was not acting in a threatening manner, and that she attempted to wave the agents past her vehicle (and did wave one vehicle past). And of course, you could emphasize that, even if she had mildly disobeyed an officer, even if she had driven in their general direction at 5 miles per hour, the penalty for that behavior should not be almost immediate execution via gunshot.
But what’s most important to say is how utterly predictable Good’s death was. This was not an unforeseeable tragedy or a freak accident. It was the inevitable outcome of an immigration enforcement apparatus that has been poorly trained, sheltered from consequences, and empowered to behave recklessly…
Read the rest over at The Dispatch.