Vol. 159: Renee Good’s last words

When free citizens confront authority figures

Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman who was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a protest demonstration there on January 7, posed no physical threat to that agent or to anyone else. This seems clear enough from multiple videos of the incident, including one recorded by the offending ICE agent, Jonathan Ross.

She did, however, pose a psychological threat. Her apparent last words to Ross were recorded on his own cell phone. As Good prepared to drive away, she leaned out of the car window with an easy smile and said: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Good’s partner taunted the agents, one of whom (presumably Ross) called her a “fucking bitch” and ordered her out of the car, which was already departing.

(See the confrontation for yourself here.)

Such cheeky impertinence isn’t the sort of thing a law-enforcement officer wants to hear, especially if he works for a morally embattled outfit like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He wants fear, or at least respect, if not groveling. He wants some recognition that he and his work are important.

Nothing so threatens an authority figure as a free citizen behaving freely. He will decide who’s mad at whom, not some lesbian mother of three with a car full of stuffed toy animals. If she won’t venerate his gun and his uniform, well, it’s time to teach her a lesson.

Self-protection or rage?

“They want us to be afraid, and they want us to be intimidated,” said a friend of Alex Pretti, who was similarly shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis on January 24, apparently because Pretti (like many others in the protest crowd) was filming the agents with his phone. Pretti’s death, she noted, was not a matter of police self-protection. “It was police rage.”

While other agents helped restrain Pretti and seized a handgun from his waistband, video showed that these agents significantly escalated the confrontation— first by pepper-spraying and striking Pretti repeatedly in the face and on the head, and then by drawing their weapons and firing at him, even after he was lying on the ground, unarmed.

Granted, ICE agents are clueless about dealing with protest demonstrations. They were hired to seize and deport helpless immigrants from their homes and jobs, preferably immigrants who haven’t read the Constitution and lack access to good lawyers. If the agents deport and/or punish enough such migrants, goes the theory, then other immigrants will get the message and leave voluntarily. And then we’ll all be happy. At least that’s the theory, I think.

Fatal beating in Memphis

Yet a lot of police violence, I would argue, stems from anger at people who disrespect them. You may recall the incident in January 2023, in which five Memphis police officers beat 29-year-old Tyre Nichols to death following a traffic stop. What strikes me about the videos of that incident is that Nichols seems to be expressing mystification at the police misbehavior and reminding them that they should do their jobs.

“Man, I didn’t do anything.” he tells them at one point. Later in the beating, he says, “You don’t do that, OK?”

When the police order hm to “Get on the fucking ground,” Nichols responds, “All right. I’m on the ground…. All right, OK?... You guys are really doin’ a lot right now.” He’s not so much pleading for his life as passing judgment on their actions. What better reason to beat him to death?

Obnoxious but innocent?

Some years ago, a San Francisco police officer, perceiving (correctly) that 50% of police calls involve domestic disputes that often escalate when the cops show up, devised a creative solution. He fashioned a police hand puppet, which he brought along with him when he made house calls. Instead of breaking into a couple’s apartments with force or threats, he engaged in a mock dialogue with his puppet (“What’s going on here?” “Gosh, I don’t know!’) that often defused a potentially dangerous situation. Need I tell you that this officer was reprimanded by his superiors for conduct unacceptable to a paramilitary organization?

One of my favorite episodes on “Law and Order”— the TV series whose stories were supposedly drawn from real cases— concerned an obnoxious murder suspect who showed no respect for the criminal justice system and treated police and prosecutors with utter contempt. So they threw the book at him. Only after he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment did the DAs discover that he was innocent.

The Chicago Seven and me

Come to think of it, I was once involved in such a situation myself— albeit without fatal consequences.

In 1969, when I was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, I spent three weeks covering the famous trial of the Chicago Seven while working on a profile of Willam Kunstler, the lead defense attorney. Kunstler’s clients— flamboyant hippies or anti-war activists like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Rennie Davis—were charged by the Nixon administration with crossing state lines to foment violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Almost everything about the defendants— their long hair, their jeans, their sneakers, their casual slouching posture, their ferret-like locomotion— was an affront to the dignity of the federal court, managed by U.S. marshals in immaculately tailored suits who cherished their lofty status.

As a Journal reporter, I too wore a suit. On the other hand, this trial was a generational conflict, and I was only 26 years old.

Although seats for that trial were in huge demand, most days I had no problem getting into the press gallery. But one day, for some reason, the marshals couldn’t find my name on their press list. When they finally straightened things out and admitted me, I remarked— good-naturedly, I thought— “You guys gotta get your act together.”

“No!” the U.S. marshal replied vehemently. “You get your act together.” His implication was clear: I don’t work for you. You work for me.

Luckily, I survived to tell this tale. Renee Good? Not so lucky.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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