Gaps
This morning in reading bits of reporting on the Minneapolis events I thought at first there was a second video, taken from in front of the car instead of behind it, but the one being cited turned out to be the same one we all ran a billion times yesterday.
The trouble is, of course, that it’s from behind, so we can’t tell if there’s another cop in front of the car and that’s the cop she was (according to team Trump) trying to hit – or as Trump cautiously put it, actually ran over.
I still don’t know. I see talk of a second video, but if it exists it’s hiding itself with great cunning.
Some NY Times reporters were talking to Trump yesterday and tried to pin him down on why the cop shot Renee Nicole Good.
Just hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Mr. Trump told a group of New York Times reporters that the woman was at fault because she had tried to “run over” the officer.
We were in the Oval Office for an interview with the president, and the unfolding situation in Minneapolis was high on our list of questions. As soon as we started asking him about the incident, he said: “I want to see nobody get shot. I want to see nobody screaming and trying to run over policemen either.”
Screaming? What screaming? What’s he talking about? Then I figured it out – he means the woman who took that video. She was indeed screaming – screaming “What the fuck?!” over and over, which is indeed irritating and distracting, but also highly understandable, and not a good reason for Trump to lie that the victim ran over a cop.
When we pressed Mr. Trump on his conclusion that the victim, Renee Nicole Good, tried to run over the agent, he asked an aide to pull up the video on a laptop in an effort to prove his point.
But it was that same video, which does not show the victim running over a cop.
It does show the victim pulling away and turning far enough to go straight on the street, but it does not show a person or persons she could have hit. We can’t tell. The car blocks our view of what’s directly in front of it as it turns.
As far as I’ve seen (yet) there is no video that shows what was in front of her car after the turn. It’s a black box. We don’t know. The video Trump’s goon showed is the same one we’ve all seen, the Zapuruder film de nos jours.
I think I’ve seen mention of four different videos, but I have only seen two of them. None shows anybody being run over, and besides, no official other than Trump himself has made that claim, as far as I know.
Anyhow, here is a reconstruction by folks at Bellingcat, who seem to be pretty careful investigators. Best watched in fullscreen. That’s on bluesky; I don’t see it on their web page.
Check here around 2:40. There’s another video shot from a different angle, further away, and very grainy. There’s not another ICEman in front of the vehicle, but it does look in that video like the killer bounced off her car. I guess if that was the only video you saw you might think he was hit, but in the other video it’s clear that he wasn’t (and of course he walked away).
Thank you Harald; useful.
According to this there was no other agent out of sight behind the victim’s SUV. That means there was no valid reason to fire at her.
She tried to pull away as the agent was in front of her left wheel, so he did have to move to avoid being smacked, but he had time and space to do that. He did do that but then for good measure he emptied his gun at her.
CNN also has both videos up on Facebook (though unlike the NYT video I posted above they haven’t synchronized them).
https://www.facebook.com/reel/25701212789512034
And apparently, soon after that, he drove away with several other ICE agents. Isn’t that kinda frowned upon, like a driver “leaving the scene of an accident”? Aren’t there protocols in place for fatal shootings by members of ICE? If they’re identifying as law enforcement officers, shouldn’t they be covered by similar regulations?
I think that falls under the rubric of tampering with the scene of a crime.
YNnB – yes and yes and yes.
With the police, at least, firing the gun is a very big deal and big headache. It is at the very least a ton of paperwork and attention from superior officers and all that. The non-psychopathic ones do not want to have to fire their weapons.