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What happened Wednesday morning in Minneapolis? If you believe Department of Homeland Security Public Affairs Officer Tricia McLaughlin, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers found themselves in mortal danger when “violent protesters” disrupted their “targeted operations.” As she said, “One of these violent rioters armed his vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.” The officer responded by shooting the driver in the head, or as McLaughlin put it, “He used his training and saved his own life and the lives of his fellow officers.”
The driver, reportedly a 37-year-old American woman, was killed.
We shouldn’t take Tricia McLaughlin’s word for it, though. We don’t even have to rely on eyewitnesses or normal journalism to understand what happened this morning in Minneapolis. There is a video that anyone can watch that shows pretty clearly what happened.
As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a press briefing: “What I can tell you is that this was done only in self-defense is a garbage narrative. It’s not true. It has no truth. And it needs to be made very clear because we’ve already seen video of it.”
Frey described the shooting as “an officer’s reckless use of force that resulted in someone’s death, killed.” But you don’t have to believe Frey either: because there’s a video you can watch for yourself.
It should are you looking at her? It was another infamous video that emerged from Minneapolis that sparked one of the broadest recent discussions about whether we all need to watch an incredibly graphic accounting of the brutality government entities (in that case, the police; in this case, ICE) commit against ordinary people. It is disturbing to have to watch these things, to be the eyes of responsibility, to witness the last unwanted moments of every other human being on Earth, and it is especially disturbing when you are a member of a persecuted group. But millions of people watched the footage of the killing of George Floyd. This is probably one of the main reasons why the cop who killed him was responsible.
I work in news so I don’t really have a choice about it or it doesn’t matter. I’m here to tell you: you can watch this one. In fact, you should watch it.
First, it’s disturbing, but not as graphic as Floyd’s video (at least, not in a gory, intimate sense). The sounds, more than the images, are the things that will haunt you here. It shows the officers coming to the car, shows the car leaving and then goes to the side of the road as it crashes. I had to watch a few times to understand when the shooting happened and who did it. There’s a lot of terrified screaming in the background, which is the stuff of nightmares, but you can get the idea by watching it in silence (if that’s the kind of thing that will help you stand it).
But it’s also extremely illuminating about specifically how inaccurate the DHS statement is. Sure, yes, this video captures under a minute in time. Maybe facts will emerge later that add more credence to the notion that this person was a threat – maybe. The whole idea of what happens next is headache-inducing; Given the federal government’s initial stance — and President Donald Trump’s stance in general toward using the Justice Department as his own plaything — it’s already laughable to expect a proper investigation of the incident by the federal government. The public should pressure local authorities to carry out such an investigation. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara assured reporters that the FBI is working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension on the investigation, “and the purpose of their involvement would be to investigate whether state laws in the state of Minnesota were violated.” There would be many obstructions to justice if it were determined that a crime was committed here by state and local officials — even though O’Hara has already repeatedly referred to the scene of the shooting as a “crime scene” — but we need at least this effort in justice.
To a much greater extent, I think what the 47 seconds in the video shows is pretty clear. This was not a “shoot to kill” moment.
Despite this clarity, narratives emerged immediately. The New York Times’ live blog of the situation, for example, made it seem like the reality could only be ascertained by triangulating the narratives of the various authorities at play here: DHS on one side and the mayor’s statements on the other. But you don’t have to triangulate between these supposedly official accounts. You can just watch the video.
And there’s another reason why you should watch the video. We currently live in a true upside down universe, one where you can’t trust your government to accurately characterize what’s going on in the world. Sure, yes, this has been going on for a long time, as long as there have been governments at all, never mind America’s. But we live in a particularly harmful time where the government we currently live under is willing to lie to our faces about what we can see with our own eyes. Specifically, Trump apparently watched the video today as well and, as is his wont, live-blogged his take on it in a giant wall of text. After stating that the woman who was killed was “obviously a professional agitator,” he claims that she “hit the ICE officer with violence, will and malice” and that “it’s hard to believe she’s alive.”
But no one was hit by the car. The officer who shot, in the video, can be seen calmly walking towards the woman he just shot and killed.
So: Your federal government is already turning on what happened this morning with a narrative that will try to justify the woman who died as a dangerous protester and cast the ICE agents who confronted her as heroes. As another government official, Frey, said, “After seeing the video of me, I want to say straight to everybody: This is bullshit.” Which government official should you believe? Well, in this case, you don’t have to decide. You can only believe your own eyes.