There are a hundred points to make and a hundred arguments to have about the chaos in Minneapolis, but the most salient question in the national political debate is why armed agents of the federal government killed two protesters.
Yes, Gov. Tim Walz‘s (D-MN) leadership deserves criticism, as does Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s. The prudence of the late Alex Pretti and Renee Good can be discussed, along with the culpability of their companions and collaborators. Former President Joe Biden’s open-borders experiment created the base conditions for this, and Democratic state, county, and city leaders made everything more violent and dangerous by refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they arrested illegal immigrant criminal suspects.
But the men of ICE and the Border Patrol carry guns and have the power of arrest as the agents of the people, and thus they ought to be held to a supremely high standard. When they act, they act on our behalf.
Even more so, their civilian bosses — Greg Bovino of the Border Patrol, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and President Donald Trump — are accountable to all Americans for their actions and policies. Nowhere is that accountability more important than when these state actors are using their legal monopoly on lethal force.
In the media maelstrom, scrutiny of the officers who shot Good and Pretti often verged into the absurd or hysterical. Reviewing videos frame by frame and splicing together four different angles can give us a better idea of what happened, but it can’t show us what the agents were seeing, much less thinking.
Zooming in too closely makes it harder, not easier, to understand the situation. It’s time to zoom out a bit and look not at the actions of the specific officers in the specific moments, but at the culture and the policies that landed those officers in those situations.
We can start with an analogy to one criticism of Good and Pretti: They wouldn’t have died if they hadn’t put themselves in a bad situation.
Now, apply that very critique to the federal officers who shot Good and Pretti.
At the moment they pulled the trigger, the officers may have seriously feared for their lives: Good was gunning her engine with an ICE officer right in front of her, and Pretti was armed when he physically confronted Border Patrol. But if you watch the full context of these videos, in the seconds before Good started driving, and in the seconds before Pretti’s gun was spotted, you see confrontational and aggressive officer behavior that might not have been necessary, and that likely escalated the situation to the point where each officer felt he had to fire.
Before the Pretti shooting, a Border Patrol agent was repeatedly shoving a woman out of the street. The woman fell, and when Pretti tried to help her up, an agent pepper-sprayed him. Then five agents went to town on Pretti, who had exhibited zero violence. The one who pepper-sprayed him began beating him with the pepper spray canister while two or three others pinned him to the ground.
It was in this chaos that agents discovered the gun, removed it, and then shot Pretti. It seems unlikely that anyone shot Pretti knowing he was unarmed. The chaos was a culprit in both cases.
Good policing involves avoiding chaos whenever possible. Prudent protesters would not have caused chaos by blowing whistles and obstructing traffic. But the errors of the protesters don’t relieve law enforcement from the duty to reduce tensions and minimize violence and the loss of life.
But reducing tension is not Noem’s style.
DHS, this administration, has a clear style: Maximize the conflict; increase the drama; flex at all times to demonstrate power and show toughness; provoke the other side. These overlap a good bit with the tactics of radicals, including plenty of folks in Minneapolis. They shouldn’t be the tactics of the government.
Noem has been clear about her vision for the department. She wants a big show of toughness. Noem’s recruiting videos have hip-hop soundtracks, dark, cinematic videos of mass roundups, and mottos like “run with the pack.”
“FAFO,” short for “F*** Around, Find Out,” is another unofficial motto on DHS social media. The FAFO attitude relishes conflict and seeks it out, since conflict is an opportunity to demonstrate superior force.
Good cops de-escalate. Too many of Noem’s cops escalate.
Noem is, at essence, a social media influencer. She sometimes uses her Cabinet department as an appendage of her social media profile, and so she favors spectacles, such as sending Border Patrol into Los Angeles parks on horseback and in armored vehicles. “Better get used to us now,” Greg Bovino, who then ran the L.A. Border Patrol office, “because this is going to be normal very soon.”
Spectacles. Shows of force. FAFO.
THE NEW GOLDEN AGE OF LOBBYING
The alternative to immigration enforcement spectacle is not no immigration enforcement. The alternative is targeted immigration enforcement: Prioritizing the removal of felons here illegally and those remaining here despite deportation orders. DHS and ICE do this, and border czar Tom Homan has emphasized this, but the Noem/Bovino approach prioritizes massive roundups and big numbers.
Combine the demand with spectacle with the attitude of FAFO, and you get a culture of bravado and arrogance instead of excellence and professionalism. And then you get Minneapolis.