American Doom All the ways the government is lying about killing an American
Ten years ago, in the summer of 2015, a police officer in Cincinnati stopped a man named Samuel DuBose. It was night on a narrow road among winding back streets of a hilly neighborhood. Words were exchanged, and DuBose tried to drive away.
Officer Ray Tensing claimed his arms were caught in the window and he was in danger of being dragged, so he shot DuBose point-blank in the head, killing him. I arrived the next day to see if protests would turn to flames. They did not. Tensing, who is white, was indicted for killing DuBose, who was Black. Eventually, Tensing was acquitted for DuBose’s killing.
At trial, the prosecution was not allowed to present evidence showing that Tensing was wearing a shirt with the confederate battle flag underneath his uniform.
The issue of police claiming that their lives were under threat by someone in a vehicle is not new. What’s new about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis yesterday is that her death came at the hands of a federal immigration agent who should have never even been in the city.
The primary reason the agent — who has not been named — was even in Minneapolis is that a right-wing political influencer made highly questionable claims about fraud committed by Somali immigrants there, prompting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to surge her teams to the city.
Good was more or less an innocent bystander. Now she’s dead because Noem wanted to continue her campaign of looking tough on immigrants, egged on by a 23-year-old kid pretending to be a journalist by filming Somali immigrants who ran childcare centers, piggybacking off actual reporting by local press who had exposed some fraud tied to the businesses.
Good is dead for this reason. She is also dead because American fascism continues to grow and spread in very troubling ways. Take a scan of social media and you’ll see plenty of your fellow Americans justifying Good’s killing. I’ll get to why that’s intellectually dishonest on its face in a moment but for now, consider the ironic phenomenon of conservative Americans lining up in support of masked federal troops occupying American cities and killing U.S. citizens with impunity under the direction of the president himself.
This is nearly the exact scenario under which our nation was founded, with all those self-identified patriotic Americans you’ll see in the coming days and weeks praising the agent who killed Good identifying with the colonists and revolutionaries who battled tyrannical overreach and a foreign military on their own streets 250 years ago. Now, the people like Good are the revolutionaries, but the patriots aren’t on their side anymore.
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Watch the video of Good’s killing and you’ll see a disorganized and unprofessional law enforcement operation. First, Good waves through an ICE vehicle that passes her by without incident.
After this, other agents approach Good’s SUV, appearing to offer contradictory commands, motioning for her to drive away before demanding she exit the vehicle and grabbing the door handle. The agent who killed Good appears to position himself in front of the vehicle — which any cop worth his or her salt will tell you is a bad idea. Good puts the SUV in reverse as an agent wrenches on her door handle. She then shifts into drive and the SUV lurches forward.
A video from another angle shows the agent who killed Good sliding from the hood to the front quarter panel of the car. As CNN’s chief law enforcement analyst, John Miller, noted on Wednesday night, it’s only after the agent is out of harm’s way from the front of the SUV that he begins firing. Prior to shooting Good, the agent had his phone out and appeared to be recording her.
All of this — the lackadaisical yet contradictory commands and actions of multiple agents on scene, the firing agent’s stupid and pointless maneuvering in front of Good’s vehicle and his filming of her — do not add up to what Noem and president Donald Trump are now trying to sell: that the agent was so in fear for his life had no choice but to fire on Good.
If all that weren’t obvious enough, Trump of course had to double down. Hours after the shooting, he claimed that the agent was “viciously” run over by Good. Video shows he was not.
In fact, the agent was never even knocked to the ground. After shooting Good and after her car rammed harmlessly into a parked vehicle nearby as she lay dead or dying behind the wheel, the agent can be seen walking just fine under his own power.
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Fatal police shootings are always fertile ground for culture war battles between the left and right. Over the last 11 years as I’ve covered them, both sides have gone to extremes. Many on the left think there’s never any reason for an officer to use fatal force. Many more on the right believe that law enforcement should be able to kill just about anyone, for just about any reason.
The reality of police uses of force and the events that precede them are much more complex than these two opposing viewpoints allow. But what used to not be up for as much of a debate was whether an officer had a legitimate fear for his life when killing someone. How anyone can watch the videos of Good’s killing and conclude that the agent was legitimately in fear for his life by a slow-rolling SUV that he was just filming with his phone defies common sense.
But we are far past that. The American right — taking their cues from Trump or vice versa; it’s hard to tell anymore — will suspend reason in order to be on what it perceives to be the correct side of this police killing-turned culture war flashpoint. They’ll either lie and say they actually believe the agent faced his own mortality and had to make an impossible choice, or they’ll convince themselves that’s the case. There’s a cost to the soul for that. Maybe it’s not one they’ll pay here but they’ll pay it eventually.
If Minneapolis burns tonight, or tomorrow, or in the coming weeks or months as Trump’s masked immigration agents focus their harassment campaign on it, there’ll be at least some level of justification. Trump and his people will feel equally justified in responding with their own violence. They’ll invoke the Insurrection Act or send in National Guard troops from Republican-led states. Hell, they’ve been wanting to do that since protests erupted in Minneapolis and across the country following the killing of George Floyd.
DuBose’s killing happened in the middle of a two-year stretch of high-profile police killings across the country. A mass protest movement spawned from that, leading to a backlash from white voters who clung to then-candidate Trump’s message of “law and order.”
That protest movement then mostly faded from view as the first Trump administration inflicted its daily chaos and corruption on the nation. It came roaring back with Floyd’s killing, further enraging the American right who watched from their small towns as big cities burned. That’s part of the reason why the attempted insurrection on January 6 was so easily dismissed by Trump and his supporters.
If Floyd protesters could burn American cities over his killing, why shouldn’t self-described patriots be able to try to overturn an election they (wrongly) believed was illegitimate?
Then, as now, we have a president who is unable or unwilling to calm tensions, instead choosing to inflame them as he sees every violent, unnecessary and tragic incident as an opportunity to score points in a nihilistic game that is hastening our national decline.
In 2020, the cooler heads in the first Trump administration stopped our would-be dictator from outright shooting Floyd protesters outside the White House. This time, protesters might not be so lucky. In fact, Trump’s troops are already killing Americans like Good.
At the time of DuBose’s killing, a question hung over the nation that was difficult to answer, and mostly persists today: Why does this keep happening? With cops all over the country interacting with Americans in innumerable tense and strange circumstances, fatal police shootings are probably always going to happen.
But when it comes to Good, the answer is obvious: This happened because of Donald Trump. He caused it. He supports it. He enjoys it. Trump and Republicans don’t see Americans who disagree with them as their fellow countrymen. They see them as the enemy. Or, as Noem described Good today, people who are engaged in “domestic terrorism.”
You tell me who you think is causing the terror: people like Good, or the people who killed her.
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