On today’s BradCast: We all saw it with our own eyes on video tape. But the Administration is doubling down anyway, vowing to send even more federal ICE officials to make things even worse. Even more violent. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Following last Wednesday’s killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, Trump Administration officials (including Donald Trump himself, his Vice President J.D. Vance and Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem), blatantly lied about the victim. She was a “domestic terrorist” who “attacked” ICE officials, they falsely claimed. Her killer, Ross, was “fighting for his life,” they suggested, when he fired three times into Good’s car, point blank, as she tried to escape in a panic. She “viciously ran over the ICE officer,” the President of the United States lied, adding falsely: “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
None of those claims are true. Good was murdered by Ross as she tried to drive around him, while another masked ICE thug was attempting to open her locked car door through the open driver side window. Ross was seen walking around the crime scene without incident afterward.
Hers was neither the first nor last ICE shooting into a vehicle. Wall Street Journal reports there have been at least 13 such shootings since July, including many in which the Dept. of Homeland Security made the same false claims — “domestic terrorism”, “attacked ICE officials”, “pinned or rammed them with their weaponized vehicle” — only to be undermined by video or other evidence that revealed their lies.
“No law enforcement professional wears a mask. None,” Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal emphasized during a press conference on Friday. “Law enforcement professionals do not shoot at moving vehicles. I’m not saying fleeing, because she [Good] was not fleeing. She was getting out of the way. Law enforcement professionals do not stand in front of moving vehicles invoking an action that is illegal. No, we don’t.”
Bilal refused to describe the ICE agents in Minneapolis as professional cops. “I call them made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement, because what they do is against not only the legal law, but the moral law.” She vowed to work with the local D.A. to prevent similar actions in her own city. “You will not be able to hide,” she said, adding “the criminal in the White House will not able to keep you from going to jail.” Bilal concluded by noting “Renee Good should be here today.”
She is not the only member of local law enforcement around the country attempting to separate what they do from the supposed policing being carried out by ICE officials, now across the country. We’re joined today by former Redlands, California Police Chief JIM BUEERMANN, founder of Future Policing Institute, who went to lengths to separate his thoughts on what ICE officials are now doing from what he describes as actual “cops” on their local beat.
“I would like to make a very clear distinction between the ICE agents and municipal police officers that I would call cops,” he told me. “They are enforcing the law, but they are not police officers. And there is a huge distinction,” said Bueermann. “There is a huge difference between the expectations of police chiefs and sheriffs across this country about the behaviors of their officers, their ‘cops’, and what appears to be the policies, practices, organizational culture of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.”
He argues that the “behaviors, practices and policies” of ICE are very different from “what we refer to as ‘community policing’ practices, and operate under seemingly very different rules.”
While clearly condemning the killing of Good, it was clear he wanted to disown the practices and behavior of his federal counterparts, who undergo “a different set of training protocols than what you see from local police officers.” He carefully condemned the federal officials of employing “bad tactics”, at least based on the video evidence we have all seen to date, such as Ross stepping in front of a running vehicle with a driver behind the wheel.
My conversation was frustrating, at times, with the cautious Bueermann. But his message was ultimately clear. “I have not seen anything, certainly, [to suggest] that this woman was a ‘domestic terrorist,'” based on the evidence he’d seen. “It’s very difficult to watch that and not think that a much better, safer, less deadly outcome was achievable without much effort.”
“We certainly need to speak up loudly about the behavior that we are seeing,” he concedes, while helping us to try and make sense of what is clearly a senseless, tragic situation. “Until something changes dramatically,” he told the L.A. Times last week, “this probably, and I say this sadly, won’t be the last tragic incident involving ICE and protesters.”
It wasn’t. Following the murder of Good on Wednesday, Oregon officials were reportedly launching their own investigation of a Thursday incident in Portland after federal officers shot a couple during a vehicle stop. Unfortunately, there has been no video released from that incident, to date.
Bueermann also shares his concerns about federal officials attempting to lock MN state officials out of the investigation of Good’s killing, and federal officials hiding their identify during their work, with masks and unmarked civilian vehicles. “You have to have your nameplate, and you have to have a badge number — all of the identifiers in a democratic policing environment,” argues Bueermann. “That’s another distinguishing factor between cops and these federal ICE agents. Cops don’t do that. ICE agents do.”
Finally, we’re joined by a few callers, including one from Minneapolis, where protests have been growing since last week and where the caller, Roger, is concerned about taking part in them, as federal officials clearly hope to, yes, terrorize the populace into tempering their First Amendment freedoms…
Most law enforcement people I’ve heard talk about the incident with Mrs. Good start with the premise that she hit her assailant and your guest was among them.
He clearly said Mrs. Good panicked and hit Mr. Ross with her car. Her wife was supposed to have yelled for her to “drive, baby drive”, probably after she saw Ross un-holster his gun. Bueermann didn’t seem to know she backed up and turned her wheels to avoid hitting Ross. If he was hit, it was very minor, to his leg or ankle.