It's not clear from any of the videos that he did not pose any immediate threat, even though people keep saying that. Saying it doesn't make it true. Even if your honest perspective is that this is the case from the camera angles you've seen, that isn't necessarily what the officers see. What the officers see matters in cases like this. They can only make decisions based on the information they have.
It may very well be an accident, miscommunication, or people even misinterpreting some of the things shown in the video. We'll find out eventually.
It could be argued that both the activists and the officers contributed to the situation getting to where it was. The activists shouldn't be following them around and harassing them, even if it is legal to do so up to a limit. The officers should have kept their cool, even with the whistles. The activists shouldn't have broken the law, whether the officers broke their protocol first or not.
Do not harass anyone who has a gun if you aren't willing to accept the risk that it could escalate into you losing your life. If he went in knowing that risk and accepted it, then he went out doing what he believed in. If he was misinformed that he was entering a safe situation where his life wasn't at risk, then he was lied to.
It's not rich to blame Alex at all. That doesn't mean it's entirely his fault or that his own mistakes justify his death, only that if you're going to make a string of mistakes don't choose that moment to be when you are harassing people who have guns. If anything good comes from this being so public, it'll be that if people do choose to harass law enforcement at least they can learn to be safer about it.
These officers know that the second they kill someone they will be unmasked. They don't get to kill people and remain anonymous. Each officer has a gun assigned to them and they know which bullets came from what gun. Generally, if an officer kills someone, it's because they felt justified in making the decision. They'll have to sort out what that justification was, even if it involved a chain of mistakes by the officer or other officers that created a cascade.
> What confidence do you have in DHS to lead an independent investigation of their own people?
I do not have any particular positive or negative opinion about DHS or their capacity to investigate. It has to be better than the local justice system there.
What I do know based on past performance is that Minneapolis courts have severely underserved justice. I think JD Vance referred to them as kangaroo courts. Not sure if that's precise or accurate by whatever definition, but I would never trust their court system.
> It's not clear from any of the videos that he did not pose any immediate threat, even though people keep saying that.
So where do you see the potential threatening behavior? When the agent shoots Alex in the back, he is kneeling on the ground and being restrained by several agents. He has not acted in a threatening manner before the shooting nor did he physically attack the agents. The DHS report does not mention any threat either and they have already reviewed bodycam footage.
> Do not harass anyone who has a gun if you aren't willing to accept the risk that it could escalate into you losing your life.
As long as you're not attacking an officer/agent with a weapon, that risk should be very close to zero. Otherwise you're sending a very chill message to the general public.
> I do not have any particular positive or negative opinion about DHS
So you have no issues with the initial statements by Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and Stephen Miller?
> So where do you see the potential threatening behavior?
If you are laying hands on officers, leaning your weight against them, not obeying their commands, asking them to assault you (verbally, potentially), resisting arrest and struggling on the ground, that string of behavior should concern anyone. Imagine you AREN'T a police officer and someone is behaving that way to you. Of course you'll be on guard more than if it was just someone walking down the sidewalk with their bag of groceries.
Being on the ground does not mean you can't be a threat. As far as an officer might know, he could have a second gun holstered under his jacket that he could reach for. When someone is that uncooperative, it is very reasonable to throw away assumptions that they aren't a threat to you.
Whether what the officers experienced justifies escalating to lethal force I don't know, but that is what they'll have to find out.
> As long as you're not attacking an officer/agent with a weapon, that risk should be very close to zero. Otherwise you're sending a very chill message to the general public.
So, if an officer hasn't been shot in the head first, they shouldn't react? Guns can come out quick and kill a person almost instantly. There's very little time to react. That is why officers request people to listen to what they say and respond reasonably so you don't put them in a situation where they miscalculate your threat level. This is true even if you're not dealing with an officer. Someone doesn't have to be a threat and they don't even have to have a weapon, but if you have sufficiently justifiable reason to believe based on their behavior and actions that they are posing an imminent threat to you or others, you can often justify shooting them. You don't have to like that, but if you ever do need to defend yourself, you would be glad the laws are like that. Otherwise people who defend themselves end up becoming a victim twice where they survive an attack and then end up in prison just for legitimately defending themselves.
> So you have no issues with the initial statements by Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and Stephen Miller?
I don't really know what any of those people were saying, but whether they are right or wrong doesn't justify everyone else being wrong by making false claims. If you want to be better, then don't try to be better by becoming the very people you disagree with.
> Being on the ground does not mean you can't be a threat.
If someone is fixated on the ground, they are not a threat. Alex was fixated by three agents, with four more agents watching from close distance.
> As far as an officer might know, he could have a second gun holstered under his jacket that he could reach for.
He wouldn't even have been able to reach for a gun as his hands were fixated at this point. That's the very point of fixating someone!
> Someone doesn't have to be a threat and they don't even have to have a weapon, but if you have sufficiently justifiable reason to believe based on their behavior and actions that they are posing an imminent threat to you or others, you can often justify shooting them.
How can you be a posing an imminent threat if you're not behaving in a threating way? At no point did Alex actually try to attack an agent or make any verbal threats against their life.
> I don't really know what any of those people were saying
Sorry, I don't believe you. There's no way you could have followed this case without knowing about their statements. You are acting in very bad faith here.
> but whether they are right or wrong doesn't justify everyone else being wrong by making false claims.
If several high officials of an agency are spreading obvious lies, it very much hurts the credibility of that agency.
> If someone is fixated on the ground, they are not a threat. Alex was fixated by three agents, with four more agents watching from close distance.
It's not clear from the videos that they have full control of all of his limbs and it seems more like he's keeping his arms tightly tucked in to resist which leaves some range of motion. The moment that he first gets shot, he's not laying flat against the ground under full control of the agents.
You have way more confidence about the amount of control they have of him than the officers seemed to. There are videos of him being highly uncooperative and violent. In the video of the killing, he's also clearly being uncooperative. It would logically follow based on his past behavior and also the way the officers feel they need to react that he's continuing to be uncooperative on the ground.
> He wouldn't even have been able to reach for a gun as his hands were fixated at this point. That's the very point of fixating someone!
You're assuming 2 things here which an officer should know they cannot assume.
1. That he's fixated. You have high confidence of this, but even watching the video frame by frame this is not fully clear. You are leaping to a conclusion that it does not seem like the video evidence can guarantee.
2. That's the only gun or weapon he has on him. He could have a gun holstered under his jacket too, which would be within reach. After all, supposedly he reached for his phone, so that is a non-fixated range of motion and they could have believed it to be a gun, reasonably.
> Sorry, I don't believe you. There's no way you could have followed this case without knowing about their statements. You are acting in very bad faith here.
I mean, I don't follow this case. I don't even know who Stephen Miller is. What I do know is there are videos and I have seen the videos along with the things people are claiming are obvious based on the videos alone. I also know that even if public statements are made, those are not law and are generally not guaranteed facts of any sort. That's what court cases try to sort out. If public officials are saying things which turn out to be false, why would that surprise anyone? It doesn't mean they lied, but they are suffering from the same kinds of nonsense that a lot of people in these comments are, where they make assumptions that are not always supported by the evidence. When society gets stupid, courts are even more essential.
> If several high officials of an agency are spreading obvious lies, it very much hurts the credibility of that agency.
This is true. You are correct. I do not support spreading lies or disinformation or just jumping to statements which have a decent chance of being inaccurate or misinterpreted. They might have said something which has some support, but which is more political language than accurate legal language just like people are invoking the word murder oblivious to its meaning.
So yes if you become a public official, ideally you don't lie unless it's for some kind of essential national strategy, because public trust has value. Not sure what else you want to know about it.
At the very same time, just because you are not a public official does not mean you should say anything you want and make any claims you want about videos. It doesn't matter what everyone else is saying. A lot of people are talking with their hearts, which is nice and we need heart, but hearts are dumb. That's not controversial.
Most of us are contributing to public trust or deteriorating public trust by some measure in daily life and in every comment we write. Do you think your statements within the past week would make people have trust in their society, or would you say in reflection that your statements erode trust in society?
There are forces at work both from outside our country and within our country that are absolutely encouraging the reduction in trust. They will amplify any opportunity they can find to do so. There's a non-zero chance that Alex was an unwitting participant in that. You don't have to make the mistake by taking the same bait.
Officers aren't perfect and mistakes were probably made. You don't have to be a Harvard professor to know the video looks bad. That's not the point. Even if it looks bad, a lot of the claims people make about what happened and about what the video shows are not supported by what the video shows. Simple.
> The moment that he first gets shot, he's not laying flat against the ground under full control of the agents.
Well, they certainly felt they were under control, otherwise the four other agents wouldn't just stand around and watch.
The problem is that they send badly trained agents with guns to patrol cities where they meet people who are (rightfully) angry at what ICE is doing. That's a recipe for desaster.
It's no secret that ICE has significantly lowered the barrier to entry and shortened the training duration. In fact, there are reports of agents being deployed before they completed their training. Apparently, they don't do proper background checks either since some agents have been found to have a criminal record. Finally, ICE is intentionally recruiting in rightwing circles, using white nationalist language.
> I don't even know who Stephen Miller is.
I have a hard time believing this. How is this even possible for anyone with even a passing interest in US politics? If that is really true, that's quite an embarrassing admission.
> that's what court cases try to sort out.
Who says the case will go to court? What if they just close the investigation?
> They might have said something which has some support, but which is more political language than accurate legal language
Why speak in the subjunctive? Why don't you look up what they said? How can you assess the credibility of an agency when you don't seem to know much about it?
> or would you say in reflection that your statements erode trust in society?
I see no reason for saying that. But if there's someone who is eroding trust then it's the Trump administration with their egregrious lies, their contempt for the rule of law and their staggering corruption.
> The problem is that they send badly trained agents with guns to patrol cities where they meet people who are (rightfully) angry at what ICE is doing. That's a recipe for desaster.
I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do, but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training. That is part of why it is so dangerous and stupid for local government to prevent the local law enforcement that does have that training from helping keep these environments safe.
The local policies are getting people killed. The local posture of hostility and delegitimization of ICE creates a dangerous environment and it is divorced from reality.
> I have a hard time believing this. How is this even possible for anyone with even a passing interest in US politics? If that is really true, that's quite an embarrassing admission.
I don't know that I'd say it's embarrassing. Don't really know who he is and I expect most people don't know who he is, because I consume far more information than most people. It's also not as critical, because people are making claims about what the videos show that are not supported by the videos themselves. As far as I know, Stephen Miller was not present during any of these events. He wasn't shot. He wasn't shooting. He wasn't protesting. He wasn't in these videos. Forcing some kind of arbitrary need to know other people to delegitimize thoughts seems very much like an emotional argument especially since no strong reasoning has been provided for why knowing him is critically relevant for making an observation within the videos.
> Who says the case will go to court? What if they just close the investigation?
It's complicated, because there has been evidence of Minneapolis court corruption. In the Renee Good case I think the FBI and the state of Minnesota were going to work together in that situation and that's how it would have worked, but the local corruption was too hard to swallow and they backed out. You cannot have an impartial investigation in the place that handled the disastrously corrupt case around George Floyd.
It looks like they're going to do something similar here even though I think people said this was CBP rather than ICE. Here again the FBI was already involved, but they're now taking the lead on it in cooperation with the DOJ: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alex-pretti-shooting-fbi-invest...
> Why speak in the subjunctive? Why don't you look up what they said? How can you assess the credibility of an agency when you don't seem to know much about it?
I have no idea what a subjunctive is. It doesn't help when you try to misdirecting attention to some random guy who wasn't there and various public statements. None of it matters. If people make a claim about a video that isn't supported by the video, they have to provide other evidence that does support their claim. People here were just making absolute statements about what the video definitely shows as if the video by itself is the entire proof of their claim. All I'm saying is that they're incorrect. It will be true 100 years from now, because information has limits.
> I see no reason for saying that. But if there's someone who is eroding trust then it's the Trump administration with their egregrious lies, their contempt for the rule of law and their staggering corruption.
You could make a fair argument that he is employing a strategy that makes it easy for activists and politicians to attack him which stokes anger. A lot of what he does is rhetorical devices and monument building to achieve deals. It wouldn't be so messy if he limited dealmaking to regular deals, but he makes everything a deal. Even Trump himself is a deal, so he builds himself up as a monument the same way he does every other thing.
He believes monumental deals are easier to get people to pay attention to and get investment in, so they are in many ways easier to do than small deals. He inflates everything to get things done, whether that's walls or greenland deals. The problem is, it actually works. He's not always right and his strategy doesn't always pay off, but it pays off often enough that there's no reason for him to stop.
Some people go into a maniacal moral panic over it and emotion oriented news and comedy media abuses it, which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump. These terrible late night shows and opinion news networks are so lost in their bubbles that they are far worse for the country than Trump could ever be. You could argue that it's Trump's fault that these shows got so bad, but in a way I've always gotten used to politicians being wrong or flexible with their words, but I still had the expectation that the news would be straight with me about what events were occurring on a day. That illusion was destroyed.
I don't have to like Trump or align with his morals to appreciate that many of the things this administration is getting done are basic fundamental national interests that a lot of the normal establishment politicians have been trying to achieve for decades without luck. He's unconventional, but the threats we face have gotten so large that we no longer have the luxury of doing things slowly.
> I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do
The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.
> but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training.
Well, because they are not meant to be patrolling US cities in the first place. Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.
> In the Renee Good case I think the FBI and the state of Minnesota were going to work together in that situation and that's how it would have worked, but the local corruption was too hard to swallow and they backed out.
That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.
> Don't really know who he is and I expect most people don't know who he is, because I consume far more information than most people.
If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people? How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?
> which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump.
Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!
Your seemingly levelheaded words are just thinly veiled complicity with the MAGA movement. In your last paragraph you really let the mask slip.
> The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.
I don't know if their training is sufficient or not for the job they're actually tasked with, but it seems to not be resulting in dead people in every other city.
> Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.
Well, if the local police don't assist, you're going to end up with more ICE than other cities since some of them have to try to do the job of the police too. Sanctuary cities may also have a higher proportion of the people ICE is going after, so it would logically follow that more ICE resources may be needed there which could inflate the numbers twice.
> That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.
Well, I did look into the George Floyd case. It was not a fair trial. If you care about fair trials, and you do like the word embarrassment, that trial was an embarrassment to all US courts. These Minneapolis protester deaths are the closest things we've seen since then as far as I know in terms of them being promoted in the public for manufacturing outrage for political gain. It's like activist organizations know Minneapolis is a particularly good place to farm this so they push harder there. It was so easy for them to incite riots and city burning, that's the kind of imagery you like to get pushed national if you're a resistance movement.
> If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people?
I probably know of them, but not by name then if they're that influential. You're still missing the point that they aren't relevant here. Whoever they are and whatever DHS does, there are laws that exist that apply. There are officers and protesters in a video. An event took place. You don't need to know the current temperature on Mars in order to estimate whether a claim about the event is supported solely by the video evidence. You know this, because you're pushing back against people making claims about what's in the videos too. You're getting lost in the weeds here.
It's like saying, "look at Stephen Miller, that's how you know the video is proof it was murder!" or "look at Stephen Miller, that's how you can tell the officers had him fully and confidently restrained!". It is not logically supportable.
> How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?
The George Floyd case was so bad, that what I'm saying is no matter what you think of DHS, they can surely do a better job than that. It's one of the worst cases of the execution of justice I can recall in my lifetime. Courts do sometimes get things wrong, but that was another level.
At the same time, I can understand the concern that if these protesters are fervently and emotionally anti-Trump then get killed by DHS, serious activists may feel uncomfortable that DHS is part of the executive branch which Trump has legal authority over. There have also been lies spread about complete legal immunity of Trump and him being a king which aren't reality, but if it contributes to distrust in the executive branch handling the case that's probably a legitimate issue of public trust. That element existed somewhat in the George Floyd case, because the local police department was part of the executive branch and people didn't trust the police, so the judicial branch took it. That is fine, except for how the courts handled it.
Either way, DOJ is involved with the case now.
> Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!
Being European doesn't mean you can't have an opinion and it's not unique to you alone that you don't understand Trump, because most people don't understand Trump. I highly doubt you see what the administration is doing, because it's very rare.
There's the law, there's what they say, there's the action, there's the goal, there's what was achieved and then there's what achieving that actually produces as an effect. Most of what is occurring aligns with vanilla strategic national interests of the US that goes back many administrations. Maybe the surface level optics and culture are different, but make no mistake that this is just the US being the US.
In short, if you think it's not about China, its probably about China. If you think it's about Greenland, it's about China. If you think it's about ending NATO, it's about China. If you think it's about immigration, it's about China.
If you don't know what China has been doing and why they've been doing it. If you don't know the things Xi Jinping has been saying. If you don't know what China has been doing in the South China Sea, or in propping up dictatorships, etc. I highly recommend, whatever your political feelings are, you dig deep and spend a couple thousand hours just consuming information about China and the history of communism.
Almost everything we're doing in the US and around the world right now can be explained from that concern as an organizing principle. Trump is just an instrument of that.
You're one of the rare people who understands Trump? (Yet you don't know who Stephen Miller his?) Give me a break! Your whitewashing of the Trump administration is mindboggling.
Stop pretending ICE and the whole administration is acting lawfully. Their disregard and contempt for the law is all too obvious. ICE is patrolling cities, breaking into homes without warrants, kidnapping people without due process and throwing them into internment camps with horrible inhumane conditions. People are rightfully angry for being terrorized.
I did not mention Stephen Miller because he is relevant for the shooting, but for the assessment of the DHS as a whole. If you have actual confidence in the DHS to lead an independent investigation of its own agents, considering the people in charge, you must be very naive.
Your country has taken a sudden and deep authoritarian turn and is right on its way into fascism. We've seen this in our own countries 90-100 years ago, it looks and sounds all too familiar. The past few months have already shown that the democratic system is in fact very fragile and can fall apart faster than people would have thought. Better wake up until it's too late!
Set a reminder for yourself in 20 years to think back on these times. Not all of your thoughts about these times will be correct, because almost nobody is 100% correct about all of the things all of the time. Recall how sure the media was about this and that, but it never panned out. It will be illuminating.
Thanks, but luckily I can recognize authoritarianism and facism when they're happening. No need to wait 20 years. We're seeing similar tendencies all over Europe and your fucking government is supporting them.
Fascism isn't possible here without stealing control of education and other institutions in a bunch of states, but what Trump has been doing is increasing education freedom. A similar argument is made with socialism and communism. "Socialism is not communism!", but you can get to communism through socialism. It's just that, in the US to do that you have to control education and other institutions in numerous states simultaneously. Marxists did try that and it's why we've had the culture war here, but we've been pushing back.
Fascists and communists also like to control language. It was Marxist movements trying to control language here and cancelling people, with widespread pressure campaigns to divide communities. Trump's unfiltered rhetoric drove them crazy and created space in the public sphere for people to speak their mind even if it wasn't politically correct. So Trump has also helped freedom of speech.
There are several other issues like that which are being addressed. It's not that everyone thinks Trump is a beacon of morality and sanity, it's just that he's getting things done that are legitimately helping address the country's challenges at the moment in time we're in.
Putting pressure on Venezuela and Iran with CIA, Mossad and the military has probably significantly delayed China's move on Taiwan. It may have even contributed to Xi Jinping's timing in arresting the last of his military high command which is unprecedented.
We'll be ok here in the US and our behavior today is in line with some pretty traditional national strategy. We were in luxury mode for too long, so part of what is happening is we're playing catch-up, which tends to involve some rudeness and chaos.
It may very well be an accident, miscommunication, or people even misinterpreting some of the things shown in the video. We'll find out eventually.
It could be argued that both the activists and the officers contributed to the situation getting to where it was. The activists shouldn't be following them around and harassing them, even if it is legal to do so up to a limit. The officers should have kept their cool, even with the whistles. The activists shouldn't have broken the law, whether the officers broke their protocol first or not.
Do not harass anyone who has a gun if you aren't willing to accept the risk that it could escalate into you losing your life. If he went in knowing that risk and accepted it, then he went out doing what he believed in. If he was misinformed that he was entering a safe situation where his life wasn't at risk, then he was lied to.
It's not rich to blame Alex at all. That doesn't mean it's entirely his fault or that his own mistakes justify his death, only that if you're going to make a string of mistakes don't choose that moment to be when you are harassing people who have guns. If anything good comes from this being so public, it'll be that if people do choose to harass law enforcement at least they can learn to be safer about it.
These officers know that the second they kill someone they will be unmasked. They don't get to kill people and remain anonymous. Each officer has a gun assigned to them and they know which bullets came from what gun. Generally, if an officer kills someone, it's because they felt justified in making the decision. They'll have to sort out what that justification was, even if it involved a chain of mistakes by the officer or other officers that created a cascade.
> What confidence do you have in DHS to lead an independent investigation of their own people?
I do not have any particular positive or negative opinion about DHS or their capacity to investigate. It has to be better than the local justice system there.
What I do know based on past performance is that Minneapolis courts have severely underserved justice. I think JD Vance referred to them as kangaroo courts. Not sure if that's precise or accurate by whatever definition, but I would never trust their court system.