Comment by pfannkuchen 5 days ago
As often happens these days, I’m confused at the hysteria here.
Police messed up and someone got killed. I feel like outrage is warranted if nothing is done about it, but after seeing the videos I’m fairly confident this won’t get swept under the rug. Will we retract our outrage when a conviction is delivered? Is there a reason we expect nothing to come of this?
> Police messed up and someone got killed.
ICE, a federal agency and not a state or municipal police force, had a man face down and unarmed. There were what, half a dozen of them? He was completely subdued. They then shot him in the back.
This was not a “mistake.” This was murder.
The reason I think it was a mistake is that the shooting happened right after one of the agents yelled “gun gun gun”. I am not involved in law enforcement, but as far as I know that is typically yelled when a person is threatening with a gun, not when they’ve been disarmed. Then when the agent(s) hear “gun gun gun” they panic and start shooting.
The way ICE was engaging initially did appear unreasonably hostile from the context that I saw, though the videos I saw did not appear to contain the entire engagement. Also police should be trained well enough to not panic in that situation, ideally. But it really doesn’t seem as simple as “random street execution” based on what I’ve seen.
He was face down on the ground and they already pulled his gun off him. They clearly do this regardless of which angle you’ve seen. He was not a threat.
I am actually pretty understanding of the pressures that LEO’s face and how unless I actually experience it I can’t fully get it, despite my political leanings. But that video was truly something to behold and I regret seeing it frankly.
This wasn’t a warzone. This was a bunch of “trained” federal agents subduing one person and then deciding to kill him. Blame poor training, blame poor judgment, it doesn’t matter. If this is what we are to expect in a situation like that, then ICE needs to withdraw and be held accountable.
All of this in the name of enforcing borders with our southern neighbors…in Minnesota? Which definitely bears mentioning, because clearly ICE was sent there to retaliate against Walz and not actually as some sort of legitimate effort to deal with illegal border crossings. The insult to injury of all this is this man died ultimately because Trump wanted to sent Walz a message.
> and then deciding to kill him
This is the key disagreement. Making this statement requires mind reading and it isn’t something we can assert one way or the other. We can only look at the evidence and make a guess.
For me, when I assess situations like this, I try to find an explanation that doesn’t require anyone to be cartoonishly evil, since very few people are actually cartoonishly evil in practice. In this case, similar to aviation incidents, there are two cascading failures, neither of which in isolation would have resulted in death, but both of which together did.
Speaking of aviation, it would probably help if there was an NTSB style agency for police killings. If there was an analysis of that type presented publicly I think it could make people feel better.
I'm an outsider, I can well understand the ever growing outrage.
In a nutshell, to date, US ICE & DHS interactions have resulted in 10 people shot **, 3 people killed, and established a pattern of high level officials immediately blatently lying and contradicting video evidence.
That pattern includes obvious attempts to avoid investigation, to excuse people involved, to not investigate the bigger picture of how interactions are staged such that civilian deaths are inevitable.
It's good to see the citizens of the US dig in and demand that federal forces and federal heads of agencies be held accountable for clearly screwed up deployments and behaviours.
** My apologies, I just saw a Wash Post headliine that indicates it is now 16 shootings that are being actively swept under a rug.
Is your ignorance intentional? The FBI raided the ICE agents home to remove incriminating paraphernalia and blocked normal investigative processes. Heads of various agencies staffed by Trump loyalists called the victim a domestic terrorist while a video showed him being shit kicked and not meaningfully resisting before being executed by an agent who I would be doing a service to by calling undisciplined.
The entire fact that ICE is in Minnesota instead of a border state with heavier illegal immigration on patrols performing illegal 4th-amendment violating door to door raids is already a complete abomination in the face of American’s rights and their constitution.
And you disapprove of outrage over an innocent man being extrajudicially executed in the face of all of this?
Let me know how the boot tasted so at least I can learn something from this
> The FBI raided the ICE agents home to remove incriminating paraphernalia and blocked normal investigative processes
Can you share what source you’re using for this? I don’t really know how we could definitively know this happened, and I’m extremely skeptical of most media outlets at this point because I have observed them lying nonstop for years.
> The entire fact that ICE is in Minnesota instead of a border state
I believe the official reply to this is that border states such as Texas are cooperating with ICE so there hasn’t been much drama there. That sounds plausible to me. As far as I know they are actively removing people from border states also, and I’m not aware of the people being removed from Minnesota being greater than those removed from Texas relative to state population or number of illegals. Have you seen that actually quantified somewhere?
> And you disapprove of outrage over an innocent man being extrajudicially executed
The police make mistakes sometimes. They always have. As long as the process to hold the individuals accountable is followed, I don’t really see what the big deal is, relative to any other time in history. Of course it is a big deal for the people involved and their families and friends, I’m just speaking from the perspective of third parties such as myself and the people I’ve observed in hysterics over this and various other events in the past years.
> Let me know how the boot tasted
I’m not in any proximity to whatever boots are or aren’t coming down, unless we buy into the “every mean-feeling action is a slippery slope to fascism” angle, which personally I do not. We are very far in the direction of permissiveness on immigration and rule of law generally. If we just rolled back to the laws and culture of 1900 for example, this would be tremendously further than anything Trump has hinted at doing. Like for much of American history most people being deported wouldn’t have been allowed to be citizens, at all, no matter how long they were here. It was only about 100 years ago that there was a Supreme Court case testing whether Indians were white for the purposes of citizenship. They weren’t, and they were deported. It’s like people’s view of American history starts in the 1960s. If we reverted to 1850 laws it wouldn’t be some kind of insane totalitarianism, even though that would be going miles and miles and miles further than we are today. It’s like everyone has been led to believe that our own history is evil.
One hint that things are weird is that if you think about the views of the average American man from 1940, the people in hysterics now would regard him as a fascist, which is obviously ahistorical, particularly since everyone’s fascism benchmarks come specifically from that era. The culture has shifted in ways that really don’t make any sense.
A lot of people would disagree with your use of the word “police.”
They wear masks, don’t get warrants before entering houses, regularly arrest American citizens, and are operating far from anything a reasonable person would call an immigration or customs checkpoint.
Also, they’ve been ordered in public (by Trump) and private (by superiors) to violate the law, and have been promised “absolute immunity” for their crimes (by Trump).
One other thing: Trump and his administration have made it clear (in writing) that ICE’s mission in Minnesota is to terrorize the public until Governor Walz makes a bunch of policy changes that the courts have declined to force. So, there’s no reasonable argument to be made that they’re acting as law enforcement.
> Will we retract our outrage when a conviction is delivered? Is there a reason we expect nothing to come of this?
I doubt the Trump DOJ will want to prosecute this. Now, if Democrats win in 2028, maybe the Newsom (or whoever) DOJ will-but Trump might just give everyone involved a pardon on the way out the door. And I doubt a state prosecution would survive the current SCOTUS majority.
So yes, there are decent reasons to suspect “nothing to come of this” in the purely legal domain. Obviously it is making an impact in the political domain.
Because the people doing the investigating are on the side of the people who committed the crimes. And the people who voted for them seem predisposed to vote for them again, even if this gets swept under the rug.
News cycles go fast. Outrage is quickly forgotten. Now more than ever, as there are new outrages coming on the heels of the last.