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Notes -
After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:
This iceman was hit by a different car previously.
The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.
It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.
it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.
Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.
All in all I think everybody here is a victim of the current evil in our society. A woman in a gay relationship with a recently deceased husband, in a new city, is being fed a constant stream of propaganda. I can imagine the state of mind if this person, and it isn’t pleasant.
She decided to try and help, which is good, but was essentially a pawn, or unknowing martyr for political power struggles I doubt she understood. A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber.
The iceman: I expect better than this. Unlike the woman, acting on pure propaganda fueled adrenaline, he is supposed to train for this. He also interacts with these people daily. He should be thinking rationally here, and the rational move is to just get out of the way, not walk in front of the car of a neurotic woman screaming at you. He is legally, technically in the clear, but this was immoral. Hes basically exploiting a series of laws and norms to allow him to “innocently” kill a woman as a form of retribution. This is akin in my mind to entrapment of some form. The iceman sets up a series of traps, and just waits for an untrained, trigger, fight or flight woman to fall into one of them. He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.
Unfortunately the same which gripped both the woman and the shooter is gripping everybody forming an opinion online around this. nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever. We will forever live in the reality where an iceman killed a woman in cold blood on Jan 7th 2026 in Minneapolis.
I don’t think this will metastasize into Floyd 2.0, mostly because the woman was white, but also because of the weather. We’ll see how this weekend plays out though.
A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?
The way I see it is that nobody was trying to murder anyone, but two people committed aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy (and I'm not desperately impressed by the ICE agent by the car door either - scaring someone into fight-or-flight mode when your partner is standing in front of their car comes close to blue falconry by aggravated stupidity).
WTF was he doing standing in front of the car? Cops are trained not to do this for a reason. I don't like hostile mindreading, but the most plausible explanations are either complete failure to think or a Rachel Corrie-esque belief that standing in front of the car would hold it in place while his partner made the arrest.
WTF was she doing? Other than "A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless" I can't make sense of it.
Aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy shouldn't be a capital crime (except where the enemy is a foreign enemy in an actual war) but per natural law it often is. The fool from ICE got lucky. Good didn't.
If this was regular cops, the other question would be why make so much effort to effect a marginal obstruction arrest. Unless Good had done something worse than making an illegal U-turn in an area ICE were operating in, it isn't likely that obstruction charges would stick if they did arrest her. This would have been, had it worked, a contempt of cop arrest. I'm not the kind of pro-disorder leftist who thinks that contempt of cop arrests should never be made, but they are a tool for removing assholes* from the situation. If someone who is an asshole but isn't actively criming wants to be somewhere else, that is a win-win outcome.
* This is a semi-technical term used by cops
Except that she knew they were ICE agents.
In the longer videos, you can see her hand "waiving through" the ICE vehicles before she is approached. She knew who they were and knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did freak out and panic when she realized the ICE agents weren't going to play nice anymore, but it's not possible to plead ignorance and "scary masked men."
More generally, a reasonable reading of the context suggests almost beyond doubt that these are cops. It's the middle of the day, they have lights on, there's a bunch of people with cameras filming what the guys with guns are doing. If this was actually some sort of impersonation of an officer or actual bad masked men (terrorists? chechens?), it seems less than likely they'd be so nonchalant about their terroristing being filmed by bystanders.
The "I got scared so I ran" defense is one of the most commonly trotted out by those that are the most comically guilty - and aware of the guilt. It's a retreat to infancy and a desperate spasm designed to cast of any and all responsibility whatsoever. It's not quite as bald faced as a temporary insanity plea, but it's in the same ballpark.
I'm not defending the woman's behaviour, which I described as aggravated stupidity. I am attacking the ICE agents for poor police work culminating in a legal but avoidable shooting.
Allowing your fight-or-flight instincts to override common sense, causing you to do something dangerously stupid to evade cops, is not acceptable behaviour, but it is reasonably predictable behaviour. Good policing isn't just about insisting on co-operation, it is also about making it psychologically easy for an untrained normie to co-operate without panicking. That is part of why normal beat police have, going back to the time of Robert Peel, eschewed the paramilitary aesthetic.
Even if you know they are all cops, a cop in tacticool gear is scarier than a cop in a regular cop uniform. (And a cop in riot gear is even scarier). If you are trying to intimidate a hardened violent criminal into surrendering without a fight, this is a good thing. In the more common scenario where you are trying to encourage petty criminals, peaceful protesters, and randos in the wrong place at the wrong time to co-operate without making loud noises or sudden movements that could be mistaken for a threat, it is a bad thing.
I think it is a valid criticism that ICE agents are not well-trained for performing this kind of policework. But it is the local officials who have forced them into this role, by refusing to allow local police who are better-trained for this to do their jobs. If those officials truly want to de-escalate, they should start arresting people who obstruct ICE themselves, rather than treating them as outlaws.
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Should it really be unacceptable to do reasonably predictable behavior? At least if you're being reasonably predictable, others can be trained to maneuvre around you.
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My read of the comment above yours was that she counted ICE as hostile soldiers.
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