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Notes -
The equal blame incident.
I'm libertarian. I'm pro immigration. I'm generally not a fan of the institution of policing and think it is run badly in many ways. I also think the average protestor belongs in a mental institution.
All of that to say I think this is generally a no one is at fault incident. Or at least one where everyone's culpability balances out in ways that they are all equally to blame.
Good went to a protest with the intent to use a deadly weapon (a car) to obstruct police officers in their duty. This is a risky thing to do. It endangers yourself and endangers others. Cars are not toys. They are about equal with guns in terms of killing people in the US each year Source. And the same holds true for police officers, where gun and car deaths in the line of duty are about equal Source.
I hate litigating specific incidents, because 99% of the time the main "this could have been prevented" turning points happen before the incident. I can think of at least two major ways Good could have prevented this (not going to the protest, or getting out of her vehicle to protest). I cannot think of any specific policy that police or ICE could have that would have prevented this. Officers are allowed to defend themselves from bodily harm or attacks on their person. Just like people in general are allowed to defend themselves from bodily harm or attacks on their person. The officer was not trying to create a situation, they were moving around the vehicle not trying to stay in front of it. If you are around police officers you should be aware that they have a heightened sense of "someone is going to attack me". Don't pretend like you are going to pull a gun on them, or pretend to charge them like you are going to beat them up. Don't nearly run into them with your vehicle. Unless you want to get shot. All of these things are also advice for how to treat a member of the public that might be carrying a firearm. People dying is a tragedy. But doing something dangerous towards someone carrying a gun and then getting shot is what I consider "accidental suicide". Its a tragedy if someone runs out into a street at a not-crosswalk and gets killed by a vehicle, no one is really at fault. Its an accidental suicide.
I've mostly been describing why Good is to blame. So why do I call it an equal blame incident? Well police and law enforcement still have some level of duty to exercise restraint in the use of deadly force. I do think the officer could have exercised that restraint here. I do not like that we have to treat police officers like wild animals or rabid dogs that might attack at the slightest provocation. Its not true for most officers, but its true for enough of them that I feel comfortable invoking the "accidental suicide".
To summarize, Good placed herself in a dangerous situation, and then did something that could be perceived as attacking an officer. The officer could have exercised restraint, but I would not expect that restraint of a private citizen.
Longevity and scissor statements
I have been surprised by the longevity of this incident in the news cycle. I mostly consider it a boring incident. As I said above I hate litigating specific incidents and asking could have been done in a split second of thinking for things to turn out differently. My rule of thumb is that something always went wrong long before someone had to make a split second life or death decision. In this case it doesn't seem like either side is strongly to blame. Good made more bad decisions leading up to the incident, but she died as a consequence which feels a little too heavy for her level of bad decision making. If the officer had died instead I'd say it was clearly Good's fault.
But I'm realizing now why I should not be as surprised by the longevity. You don't go to battle over a culture war incident if you feel like it is a losing ground. In an alternate world where Good had struck and killed a police officer with her vehicle I'd bet the story would be buried. Or at least no more talked about than the incident where 15 armed people tried to shoot and attack ICE agents (its still insane to me that this happened).
In all battles you only want to commit when you feel you can win. In the culture war winning means being morally right. Battles take two to tango though. So major controversies spring up when both sides feel like they are in the right. In this theoretical model the most battled over topics will always be scissor statements. The likelihood of "battles" is also helped along by however distorted the view of reality is by the partisans. If partisans had perfect perceptions of reality then only truly 50-50 incidents would spark up any controversy. But if they have something like a 5% bias for their side then incidents that are 45-55 would also spark up battles. The wider the gap in perception the more things become battles.
But I think reality can still partially penetrate partisan perceptions, so even when they have noticeable bias towards their own side they can notice a slightly losing argument. So they'll drop the topics where they feel that they are losing. Meaning that even if with partisan perceptions distorting reality a 50-50 incident is going to stick around much longer.
Come on, this is a false equivalence. Try parking a truck into the parking lot of your local police department, then walk in while carrying a shotgun. Carefully observe which of these actions will cause more concern. Try to convince them that the real danger is your truck.
Cars kill a lot of people because they are ubiquitous. The majority of adult Americans are drivers, and drivers spend around an hour per day driving. The average American definitely does not spend half a hour every day shooting or even handling guns. There is a reason while there are few mafia movies where the cleaners rely on cars to kill their victims.
If she had pointed a gun at Ross, I would completely concede self-defense immediately. The main purpose of a gun is to kill or incapacitate soft targets, and given the low frequency of mountain lions in urban Minnesota, it is 100% reasonable to assume that she was in fact going to shoot Ross. Even if her gun was later found to be unloaded.
But cars (even bloody SUVs -- that is another CW angle) are rarely used in intentional or even depraved heart homicides, most car deaths are accidents, negligent manslaughter.
So Good driving in the general direction of Ross is a lot more ambiguous than her pointing a gun at him, because cars have plenty of uses besides killing federal agents. There was of course a chance that she was absolutely going to murder him. There was also a chance that she was going to drive over him because she had decided that ICE lives don't matter (depraved heart), or that she had not realized that he was standing in her path. There was also a chance that she was merely going to graze him either from a motivation of depraved heart or because she had misjudged the turn radius of her car. Possibly there was also a chance that she was going to miss him entirely.
Now, if she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. (Though the risk of hitting bystanders would still need to be weighted against the probability of stopping her car.) Even then, it was not a good tactical move compared to getting out of the way, but that would not have been a legal issue.
For the injuries she actually inflicted on him, a headshot was clearly an overreaction, I think most people will agree that letting people grazed by cars shoot the driver is generally a bad idea.
These probabilities do matter if we evaluate a claim of self-defense. Basically, if you see a 6yo (-15) in Germany (-20) on Fasching (-20) point a gun-shaped object which looks like plastic (-15) at you, it is not reasonable to conclude that you are about to be shot by a live firearm and kill the kid. If you see a drug addict in Central Park point what looks like a firearm in your direction, that conclusion would be different.
In this case, a good prosecutor might make the case that you had someone who was distracted by filming with a mobile phone getting startled by a car which was suddenly moving towards him and then decided to compensate his lack of situational awareness through deadly force.
As I've said before I don't like litigating split second decision making. Most of your post is that.
The only real person with the ability to make decisions beforehand that could have prevented this is Good. She could have chosen to exit her vehicle at the protest or to turn off the engine. The other possibility that I just thought of is that ICE starts using armored vehicles and just starts ramming through obstructing vehicles. I don't want ICE to adopt that policy, do you?
She choose to use a vehicle to obstruct other vehicles and to drive in an area with pedestrians and people on foot. Her obstructing vehicles is part of the reason there were officers on foot in the first place. Unless she thought it would just be a perfect statement where she gets to obstruct a law she doesn't like and the result is that ICE just politely sits in their vehicles going no where and letting her obstruct them?
Your truck example is the false equivalence. Try using your truck to block the entrance to the police parking lot or your body to block the entrance of the front door. Those are equivalent.
Or line your truck up with the pedestrian exit to the police station and rev the engine like you are about to run them over. You will be treated like you are holding a shotgun. They will aim their guns at you and tell at you to get out. If you instead start moving the truck towards them they will unload as if you had lifted the shotgun into an aiming position.
In your example they get out of the truck. I suggested that was one of the things Good could have done to deescalate the situation. The equivalent would be leaving your shotgun in the trunk of your car. A weapon that you do not currently possess is of course far less threatening in the immediate situation.
If a policy relies on people making split second complex judgements then the policy sucks. I already put some fault on ice for being too willing to use deadly force. But that is because I hold agents of the government to a higher standard than I do individuals. And I think any individual would have been justified in using deadly force against a vehicle in this exact situation. In the US they'd also be legally in the clear, in Europe, which doesn't believe in self defense, probably not.
What policy changes would you suggest that could have prevented this? Being reasonable in the sense that any policy that amounts to "be ineffective anytime someone uses this tactic against you" is a non-starter.
I say this as someone that disagrees with the goals of ICE. But I do not see a policy that would have lead to a guaranteed better outcome here.
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Now, try driving the truck through the front of the building and see what the reaction is.
The SUV here is dangerous when it is being pointed at a human being; hell, if she'd had a rifle in her passenger seat when she did this, I'd still argue that the SUV is the greater threat.
If he had a reasonable belief that she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. Self-defense standards do not require someone to be a mind reader, nor do they require that the other person has an intent to kill. It is permissible to shoot someone who is high out of their mind, but pointing a gun at a crowd, even if he is unable to comprehend how dangerous the gun is at the moment. It is also reasonable to shoot someone who yells out in anger "I'm going to fucking kill you!" and reaches towards what appears to be a concealed weapon (even if they aren't actually armed, and were simply going to whip out their dick or some such nonsense).
Just for fun, go stand in front of a parked SUV - and take a look at what you could see of the "driver". You'll notice that it is basically only the head, especially on a smaller driver (like, say, a woman).
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I think you're underestimating the impact of racism, sexism, tribalism, and profiling in the perception of this incident as compared to others.
Renee Good was a 37 year old white mother of three. I haven't looked into her background, but just judging from the car not being a complete heap I don't think she was impoverished, we can probably label her middle class. There's virtually no chance, with just that data, that she was out there engaged in a suicide terrorist mission. She might literally have to be the first middle aged white woman in all of American history to do something like that. I asked both ChatGPT and Grok, neither could bring me a single documented case of a white woman between the ages of 30-50 killing an on-duty police officer in the history of the United States. If we included "middle class," "mother of three," and "not visibly disordered" it would cut those odds even more. When I asked for 30-50 year old white female terrorists period (not just anti-cop), the closest I got was Shawna Forde who murdered two illegal immigrants as part of some cockamamie border militia thing, and maybe some left wing bank robbers from the 70s but those were getaway drivers. If anyone else can find me examples of 30-50 year old white women killing on-duty cops, let me know!
Liberals might decry racial profiling, but they believe in it, because it is obviously true. A male suspect is vastly more likely to be dangerous than a female, an old suspect less dangerous than a young one, a black suspect more dangerous than a white one. A middle aged white woman is just vastly unlikely to be a domestic terrorist engaged in an anti-cop suicide mission.
The white middle class might dislike what ICE is doing or we might not particularly care, but we pretty much assume that whatever happens it won't touch us. This is one of us getting shot. Not some immigrant getting sent to a foreign torture prison in Cuba or El Salvador, not some black kid in baggie pants getting killed, this is a middle aged woman who looks like my sister, my coworkers, my grad school classmates. I might roll my eyes when they lib out, that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with a world where they might get shot. A middle class liberal might decry his privilege, but he still believed in it, that as a middle class white person he was protected, that bad things wouldn't happen to him. This pierced that privilege. And that's hard to deal with.
The reason this is hanging around is because Renee Good doesn't fit the profile of the kind of person who gets killed by the cops. Turbolibs love to quote Wilholt's law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." And they believed that, they believed they were in the group that the law protected but did not bind. Every accusation is an admission. White liberals believed that their privilege would protect them. It turns out it will not.
And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.
I find it so difficult to see this perspective. Literally all anyone has to do to achieve complete safety is not deliberately antagonise and obstruct members of the police force or equivalent as they go about their duty. You see a bunch of agents, you give them five minutes and you don't get in the way.
Do they really think that ICE are on some spree killing of middle-aged white women now?
The right to peacefully protest is a direct Constitutional right. A direct right. I think there's reasonable room to disagree about, and interesting discussion to be had, regarding the line between obstruction and protest. From that framing, obviously protesting/obstructing is risky, sure, but that's an official state-approved exercise of rights as much as free speech is or as much as the right to a jury trial. There's considerable meat to the argument that a right left unexercised is effectively a dead right.
Time, place, and manner restrictions, applied in a viewpoint-neutral manner, have been repeatedly held to be fully compliant with the First Amendment. The First Amendment doesn't give you the right to scream directly in someone's face, if that would be disorderly conduct in any other circumstance.
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At the least, if you have a middle-aged white woman in your life that you care about, please talk to them, make sure they know real people in grass world love them, and research de-radicalization strategies.
If you know of some, unironically I would like them. I do have a brother that is thankfully living abroad right now, but who otherwise I'd be genuinely worried about them doing something very rash at an anti-Israel protest. He does know we love him at least.
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Thankfully the middle-aged white women in my life are much more liberal than me but still reasonably sensible. It's the middle-aged men who spam me with 'did you see what Trump did today' and 'this would never have happened before Brexit'. (I'm in the UK).
EDIT: I realised that you meant 'middle-aged' as in 37 and now I feel old. I was talking 50-60.
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I can't get on board with setting the scene as "intent to use a deadly weapon (a car)". I use a car all the time, without any intent to use it is as a deadly weapon or for it to have any function as such. Sure, it is probably reasonable that if I murder someone with a car, it can be classified as murder with a deadly weapon, just as a baseball bat also seems like a deadly weapon if I swing it at someone's head. But I can bring a car or a baseball bat to my kid's school, and I have a lot of doubt that Good brought her car to the scene in order to take advantage of the car's potential function as a deadly weapon (i.e., to harm or to threaten). Mostly, it seems like they wanted to use the car's large mass to impede the path of the ICE vehicle, and also that the car was their transportation.
Let's say someone hits somebody with a car at a school. Should the lede really be that "The driver brought a deadly weapon (their car) to an elementary school?"
Using a car as transportation is not something I'd say qualifies as intending to use a deadly weapon.
Using a car's physical mass, and the threat of that physical mass to intentionally obstruct others? That is definitely crossing into weaponization territory.
Also what happens when Good's obstruction is determined to be illegal? If she is on foot the authorities can use their bodies to arrest and restrain her. If she is in a vehicle they need her to cooperate and leave the vehicle. If she decides instead to flee in that vehicle she has now created a hazardous car chase scenario. Even if she had not nearly run someone over and no one had shot her, she still did the wrong thing by driving away.
I doubt she was thinking through any of these things, but thats exactly the problem she escalated the danger of the situation for others by adding her vehicle to it. The fact that she was ultimately the one to get killed feels a little harsh to me, but if anyone was going to die that day for what happened I'd have most preferred it to be Good.
If you can pass a law which says that the authorities can shoot someone for driving away, get it passed.
If you can't pass such a law, then you should let them drive away.
Pick one.
You are allowed to defend yourself and others in this country from threats of deadly harm with lethal force. A vehicle driving at someone is a deadly threat. This is already the law of the land.
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What about just using a car's physical mass, and NOT the threat of it, to intentionally obstruct others? Moving your car back and forth to block someone else's car is just using the physical mass, not threatening.
Then turn off the engine.
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And if someone gets in the way of that physical mass while you are moving it?
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She was actually kind of using it as a weapon though -- more of a defensive weapon, but still.
If after you dropped your kids off at the school parking lot, you parked in front of the entrance and didn't let anyone but your friends through, I think it would be fair to say that you were using the car as something like a weapon? Certainly it's a tool of physical force.
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