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I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here. That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him? That it is a good thing that he died? That the circumstance that he was killed should not make people update in the direction of a negative opinion of ICE, their mission, or the way they are implementing it? These are all different assertions, and a post that only amounts to a nebulous "boo Pretti, and boo all of the people who say yay Pretti too" does not do a particularly good job of defending any single one of them unless all you are doing is playing the Ethnic Tension game.
However antisocial or stupid he was seems irrelevant to the immediate charge which got so many people (including, seemingly, ones who are otherwise sympathetic to ICE and police shootings) riled up about the case, which is that his killing was unambiguously unnecessary for the safety of the ICE officers who did it. Whether this charge is actually true can be debated separately, with no reference to Pretti's character or past actions. If it is in fact false, his character doesn't matter anyway because you have as much of a right to self-defense against Mother Theresa as you have against Hitler. If it is true, I wish you would be more explicit about the actual contours of any right to performing summary executions you want to grant ICE if the target is a sufficiently bad person.
Pretti should not have been shot. He was disarmed and not a serious threat at that moment. Unfortunately, it was a highly chaotic situation with protesters doing their best to cause stress and confusion. Pretti was disarmed just a moment before he was shot, and it is unlikely the other officers present knew he had been disarmed. It's quite possible one of the officers called out something like "I've got his gun", but in all the chaos another heard "he's got a gun!"
It was not an execution. It was a panicked split-second decision that proved fatally mistaken. Shooting him multiple times in quick succession is actually evidence of this, since your goal is to quickly and decisively end the threat. You don't shoot once and then wait to see if he can still shoot back before resuming fire, because that's just a good way of getting more people killed. Executions are more deliberate and conservative with ammo.
The video evidence of prior days indicates that Pretti was repeatedly inserting himself into dangerous situations with police while armed. He was indisputably obstructing, not just exercising his first amendment rights. He was intentionally creating circumstances that would give officers a legitimate fear for their life and heighten the chances of one of those officers making a fatal mistake. If you keep playing Russian roulette, you will eventually end up with a bullet in the head.
While the new videos don't change the narrow question of whether the officer should have shot at that moment, it does a lot to change the whole narrative around the shooting and how much blame should be apportioned to the victim himself
By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.
This is just an attempt to spin a narrative to defend the in-group. Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution and does not engender the levels of competency that should/is required by agents of the state. If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations then they shouldn't have guns and the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence.
It was an accident, in all likelihood the claim from everyone will turn into "we thought he still had a gun."
That's accidental mutual combat, self-defense, a tragedy, whatever - not an execution or assassination as we see the media try.
I'm not sure how shooting a disarmed person in the back who is being restrained will ever be seen as "self-defense". A Tragedy, absolutely. An accident, sure I can grant that. But accidents that lead to death is manslaughter and the ICE agent should be tried for that. Mutual combat is far fetched.
I wrote about similar situations in one of my recent posts.
If you haven't been in a scuffle like this it is hard to convey.
Even if you do something (like disarm the guy), it takes awhile for everyone to be aware of that, even in a controlled environment. In a messy situation like this? Fuck no.
It looks bad, but if you had omniscient level understanding of everyone's moment to moment information and thought process you'd likely see that the thinking here was not the problem.
These things just aren't like the movies or how people think they are, which is one of the reasons why after the Good situation a lot of were like "no, stop doing this, no training and skill is enough, keep doing things like this and more unavoidable bad outcomes will happen. When not if."
A proper investigation would settle many of these disagreements of fact. Whether everyone now performing motivated reasoning for or against ICE will accept the results of such an investigation is unknown. But the last I heard, DHS has decided to investigate themselves and assigned the investigation to an org who has no training or experience in doing such a task and also doesn't have the equipment. That's troubling.
Lots of investigation and litigation did little to change any minds in the Rittenhouse case, even though it was immediately obvious it was one of the clearest self defense cases ever.
The Good case requires no investigation - all the necessary information was immediately available, it's obvious the shoot was fine. Further information only provided additional evidence Good was an idiot and may provide some rhetorical flourish.
This case is a tragedy, but again additional information isn't needed, it just might soften the view for some people who don't understand what is going on.
Most of the criticism is coming from people who don't have any understanding of how this works, in the context of a social milieu and lying media that lets this ignorance get passed around long enough to be fact.
Take a look at the Good case - you have a ton of armchair quarterbacking going frame by frame trying to find an excuse to blame Ice. People do not operate at those decision speeds. It's just attempts to retroactively justify outrage.
You can say that my clarity is false and you don't agree on the facts, but then we are just looking at a two screen world - any investigate is meaningless for truth seeking, it's just about rhetoric and propaganda.
If you're claiming it requires no investigation in order to change minds that can't be changed, I have no argument. Investigations are conducted in matters such as this because we are a nation of civilized people governed by rules and laws. That's what we conservatives are trying to conserve (among other things).
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