The political right in the west – both in the United States and Europe – has a long and proud tradition of opposing the use of political power to coerce and subdue the public. In my years editing this website, that principle has been at the core of the forefront of both my own writing, and our approach to the news more generally.
We opposed hate speech laws, for example, because the state’s power to wield force should not be used in the service of shutting down your opinions. That is a basic principle. We have written with deep skepticism over coercive policies like the deposit return scheme, which seek to penalise those who do not do exactly as the state wishes when it comes to recycling their plastic bottles. We have consistently stood with anti-immigration protesters in places like Newtown Mount Kennedy, where our own Fatima Gunning was pepper sprayed in the face in the service of documenting a police response that was clearly over-zealous and infringed on protesters’ civil liberties.
It will not then come as a surprise to readers that I do not think it is acceptable for Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to shoot a young mother of three to death in the street, which is what has happened in Minnesota.
By now, if you are reading this, I assume you have watched the video. If not, then it is here. You will notice that the time that elapses between the first agent getting out of his car to approach the now dead woman, and the shooting itself, is literally ten seconds. That is ten seconds in which the agents approached a stationary vehicle, shouted at the occupant, tried to force open her doors, and then shot her dead. Shooting was not the last resort here, it was the first option.
Let’s dispense with the frivolities, before moving on with the formalities.
I have seen in recent days some attempts to justify the shooting on the basis that the dead woman was attempting to obstruct law enforcement officers from going about their lawful business, in this case rounding up suspected illegal immigrants. That is true – she was indeed by all accounts attempting to obstruct them. That is a criminal offence in the United States, punishable on conviction – depending on the seriousness – by a prison sentence ranging from 60 days to 10 years, the latter only if terrorism is a motive or a factor. It does not carry the death penalty. It certainly does not carry the death penalty without trial.
I have also seen an argument online that the agent who fired the fatal shots had previously been traumatised after being dragged by a car down a street during a similar incident, and a suggestion that this is some kind of mitigating factor. To which I would say: If the US Government is putting traumatised officers on the street to carry out law enforcement, then that is a dereliction of duty to the public, to the officer, and to public safety.
Those are frivolities. They are not serious arguments.
The more serious arguments are those raised by the US Vice President, JD Vance, who stood at a White House Podium yesterday to justify the death of one of his own citizens at the hands of forces under the direct command of the administration:
Let’s – for the sake of argument – accept every single point that the Vice President makes there. That the woman was breaking the law. That she put herself in a bad situation. That the officer concerned feared for his life. Let’s accept all of it. Even at that, the actions of the state agents involved her border on the tyrannical.
First, this was not a shooting by police. Immigrations and Customs enforcement are not cops, and they do not have the power to detain or otherwise engage with people not suspected of being an illegal migrant or committing customs offences. If the deceased lady was blocking the road, then the correct procedure was to call the cops, not to simply assume the power of federal police agents. Second, the lack of training involved is obvious: you’re forced to explain why the officer who killed Ms Good positioned himself in front of her car in the first place. That’s a no-no according to most policing manuals, and exceedingly foolish as a tactical matter. If you are standing in front of a car and the driver decides to ram you at high speed, what are the chances that shooting them will stop the car, especially at that range?
Third, three shots were fired into that car, not one. The video clearly shows that two of those shots were fired after there could be no doubt whatsoever that no officer involved was facing a threat to his life. We do not know which of the bullets fired killed the woman, but we do know that 66% of the bullets were fired when any immediate threat to the well-being of officers had passed. You might say “but John they needed to stop her getting away” – in point of fact, they did not. The police – not even the American police – do not get to kill the bad guys just to save themselves the hassle of chasing the bad guys.
Other obvious questions should occur to anybody concerned with civil liberties: Why did the first interjecting agent immediately try to open the door of the car instead of giving the driver a chance to comply with his orders? Cops in the USA are understandably cautious about approaching drivers whom they intend to confront. Any person, faced with a masked and armed man trying to forcibly open the door of their car, might panic and attempt to flee. The reaction of the driver was within the range of evidently foreseeable outcomes.
Finally, two points are undisputed: First, that ICE agents intervened to prevent a private citizen who identified himself as a doctor from treating the bleeding, now dead, woman. Second, that the ICE agent who fired the shots departed the scene immediately and did not stay to be interviewed by other policemen. That latter point is outrageous police conduct, even if you are still clinging to some justification for the actual firing of the shots.
Also, we must marvel at the sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty of Vice President Vance. Listen to him above, saying that “we cannot know” what the woman’s intentions were.
Now read what he also posted on X:
So, on the one hand, the Vice President when talking to trained journalists doesn’t know what the woman was trying to do, when he speaks to the media. On the other hand, when he is on social media, he is able to look into her cold dead heart and divine that she was “trying to run the officer over”.
Governments in western democracies exist to defend the public’s civil liberties. That includes, and must always include, the right to express political opinions and protest against the actions of the sitting Government, even for your opponents. A state that draws weapons on its own civilians in the course of a protest and uses lethal force against them has very little claim to be “western” or “civilised”. It has much more in common with Iran. More so, when the Vice President of that state is looking into the heart of a dead mother to posthumously convict her of attempted murder.
If you are the kind of person – and unfortunately, many of them seem to exist – who would complain about “brutal policing tactics” in Newtown Mount Kennedy, and then simultaneously defend the kind of savagery we’ve seen carried out in the name of the Trump administration in Minnesota, then I think you have lost your way very badly. That is not ideology, but tribalism. And the thing about tribalism is this: Everything you justify when your own “side” does it will be doled back out to you, a hundred fold, the next time the other “tribe” is in power.
Finally, it may well be the case that the officer in question panicked, or even that he acted in good faith and simply got it wrong. That tends to happen when you have armed police forces, which is one reason why this country has always been hostile to them. But that is a substantially different defence to the one being mounted, which is essentially that this woman did something wrong and deserved to die for it. She did not deserve to die. And the state that has killed her should answer for that crime. That is the conservative, right leaning position. Anything else is something much darker.