The Smear After the Smoke
Renee Good, the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, and the reflex that keeps getting people killed
The first thing I noticed wasn’t the gunshot.
It was the winter soundscape—horns, shouting, sirens, that metallic Minneapolis cold that makes everything feel sharper than it should. Snow piled up on the shoulders of the road like a quiet border, and the whole scene looked less like “violent unrest” and more like a tranquil winter morning—certainly not the kind of chaos some would have us believe was unfolding.
And then the rest of it: a red SUV, a brief encounter, and Renee Good—37 years old, a mother of three—dead after being shot by an ICE officer. By multiple accounts, she had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school shortly before this happened.
If you only consume this story through partisan headlines, you can already feel the gravitational pull: She must have done something. The agent must have feared for his life. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
But that’s exactly the problem.
Because the reporting, the video, and the public dispute from local officials don’t support the simple morality play that so many people rushed to tell. And yet a large swath of the American right arrived at a verdict immediately: Renee Good was in the wrong; the agent was in the right; case closed.
I want to slow that reflex down long enough to name what it costs us.
The video (so you can see for yourself)
What the video does—and doesn’t—allow us to say
When the state kills someone, the minimum moral requirement is restraint. Factual care. A willingness to let evidence speak before anyone starts writing a script.
Instead, the Trump administration responded with confident certainty. The President publicly labeled Renee Good a “professional agitator” and pushed a self-defense narrative immediately—before most people had even watched the footage closely.
What happens to a country when officials say things that don’t match what people can plainly see? At that point it isn’t “messaging.” It’s a lie with a veneer of authority—and it trains the public to treat loyalty as the highest civic virtue.
I’m not someone who thinks policing is inherently evil. I’ve known enough decent officers—and lived long enough in the real world—to know that some situations turn dangerous fast. That’s precisely why I can’t make peace with anonymity, spin, and escalation. If the state can kill and then narrate its way out of accountability, none of us are actually safer.
To be fair, I understand why some people default to the officer’s perspective. Law enforcement encounters can turn in seconds. Officers really do get hurt and killed. A vehicle really can be a weapon. If you’ve internalized that reality—or if you’ve watched enough videos of traffic stops going sideways—you might feel the instinct to say, “I’m not going to second-guess a split-second decision from my couch.”
That instinct is understandable. But it’s not the same as a blank check. “Danger exists” is not an argument for anonymity, for shooting into chaos, or for lying afterward. If we can’t even agree that evidence matters more than talking points, we’ve traded justice for loyalty.
And lies don’t just distort one story. They train a public. They teach people that the proper response to a killing by the state is not grief or scrutiny, but allegiance—especially when the victim is politically convenient to dismiss.
The mask is the message
This incident also landed inside a broader pattern people have been watching: ICE operations increasingly feature masked, hard-to-identify agents.
In a free society, law enforcement doesn’t get to be anonymous—especially not while issuing commands at gunpoint, detaining people, or operating on public streets. Authority is bound to identity precisely so abuses can be investigated and punished. That’s not an “optics” concern. It’s a basic principle of accountability.
What does it do to a society when people with guns and legal power can act without being identified? That isn’t a small procedural change. It flips the moral logic of policing: authority without accountability.
Masks aren’t neutral. They communicate: you will be acted upon, but you may not know by whom.
That is not public service. It is power.
And when power is anonymous, it becomes easier to use it recklessly—because the social cost of misuse is reduced. If no one can identify you, then the public can’t hold you. And if the public can’t hold you, then the institution can protect you more easily.
Training isn’t a magic word when the system is built to escalate
After a killing like this, defenders often fall back on a familiar phrase: “the officer followed training.”
But training is not a moral shield. And in this case, training and recruitment are part of the story—not an escape hatch from it.
ICE has been in a rapid expansion posture. When enforcement agencies scale quickly, screening gets stressed, standards bend, and culture becomes harder to shape and control. Even if you assume good intentions in some places, a system built around speed, saturation, and spectacle will predictably produce “split-second” tragedies.
And a government that treats these tragedies as public relations problems—rather than moral emergencies—will eventually start behaving like a machine that cannot admit it has harmed anyone at all.
At that point, it’s not “a bad apple.” It’s institutional design.
Humanizing before critique: why the reflex is so tempting
I don’t think most people wake up eager to excuse injustice. I think they wake up tired, anxious, and hungry for a world that feels legible—where the “good guys” are obvious and chaos stays contained.
And to be clear: the desire for safety and order is good—it’s part of what it means to love your neighbor well.
In that state, the instinct to defend the agent can feel like defending stability itself. And then the modern media economy—especially the incentive structure of influencers and partisan strategists—steps in and monetizes that hunger. Ordinary people want safety; the machine sells certainty.
Which is why a single line from a politician can travel faster than a careful timeline, and why “case closed” feels easier than “let me actually look.”
(Also: my phone is never more confident than when it knows the least—thanks, algorithm.)
The extremist-ecosystem risk is real, even when specific labels get sloppy
There’s another concern that needs to be handled carefully, because it’s easy to overstate and therefore easy to dismiss: whether ICE recruitment and culture are drawing from, or signaling to, far-right extremist ecosystems.
I want to be precise. It is not responsible to claim, as a settled fact, that identifiable “Proud Boys are now ICE officers” without publicly verified documentation for specific individuals.
But the larger concern—extremist contamination of recruitment pipelines and enforcement culture—is not speculative. Lawmakers have demanded records and explanations. Researchers and journalists have scrutinized recruitment messaging that feels uncomfortably aligned with grievance politics. And the broader trend is obvious: the administration has elevated an enforcement posture that attracts applicants who want power, not service.
Even if no one can prove a particular agent’s partisan affiliation, the moral hazard remains: if your system recruits from milieus that romanticize domination and dehumanize outsiders, you’re going to produce officers who behave accordingly.
When the job is built to treat people like threats, eventually someone will be treated like a target.
The collateral damage: good law enforcement loses credibility
Here’s a tension I don’t want to dodge: many local law enforcement officers take their responsibilities seriously. They live in communities. They answer to local leadership. They understand—at least in principle—that trust is part of the job.
When federal agents operate with anonymity, escalating tactics, and political cover, they don’t just harm immigrant communities or protesters or “the other side.”
They poison the public’s ability to trust anyone wearing a uniform.
They make community cooperation harder. They make routine encounters more brittle. They place decent officers under a cloud they did not create.
And then they demand loyalty anyway—“back the badge,” “trust the system,” “don’t ask questions.”
That doesn’t strengthen public safety. It hollows it out.
The knee-jerk instinct on the right: certainty without curiosity
This is the part I most want to confront, because it is so revealing of where we are as a country:
When something like this happens, many people don’t ask, “What happened?”
They ask, “Whose team is this?”
And then the verdict arrives fully formed: Renee Good must have deserved it; the agent must have been right.
Even when evidence is disputed. Even when video raises hard questions. Even when local officials contradict the administration’s framing.
If our first instinct is always to defend authority—before we look, before we ask, before we grieve—what will we eventually excuse? And what kind of people will that make us?
It is certainty without curiosity—and it is corrosive.
It trains our moral instincts away from the most basic human discipline: to look, to listen, to tell the truth, and to refuse to dehumanize someone just because their death is politically convenient.
Closing: the common good is slower than a hot take
A society committed to the common good should be able to hold two truths at once:
Law enforcement work can be dangerous.
The state still has an absolute moral obligation to avoid unnecessary lethal force—and to tell the truth when it uses it.
Renee Good’s death is not just a story about one officer and one moment. It’s a story about a posture: escalation over restraint, anonymity over accountability, spin over humility.
Here’s a small practice I’m trying to adopt: before I repeat a claim—before I retweet, before I comment, before I decide who I think the villain is—I’m going to watch the footage, read one careful timeline, and ask one slow question: What would I want the public to demand if this were my sister?
And here’s a concrete civic ask: if federal agents are operating in our neighborhoods, they should be clearly identifiable—name, badge number, agency—every time. No anonymity. No secret-police aesthetics. Accountability isn’t anti-law-enforcement; it’s the only thing that keeps law enforcement worthy of public trust.
And the question isn’t whether this posture will come for “the other side.”
The question is when it comes for someone you love—will you finally want the truth to matter?