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What happened in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning? If you believe Tricia McLaughlin, public affairs officer for the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers found themselves in mortal danger when “violent protesters” interrupted their “targeted operations.” As she put it, “One of the violent thugs armed her vehicle and attempted 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 to save his own life and the lives of other officers.”
The driver, a 37-year-old American woman, was reportedly killed.
We don’t have to take Tricia McLaughlin’s word for it, though. We don’t even have to rely on eyewitnesses or normal news reports to understand what happened in Minneapolis this morning. There is a video that anyone can watch that shows very clearly what happened.
As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a press conference: “What I can tell you is that this narrative of just being in self-defense is a garbage narrative. That’s not true. There’s no truth to it. And it needs to be made very clear because we’ve seen the video of it.”
Frey described the shooting as “a reckless use of authority by an agent that resulted in someone dying, someone being killed.” But you don’t have to believe Frey: Because there’s a video you can watch for yourself.
should Do you see it? It’s another infamous video from Minneapolis that has sparked one of the most widespread discussions of recent times, about whether we all need to watch incredibly graphic documentation of brutality committed by government entities (in this case, the police; in this case, ICE) against ordinary people. It is disturbing to have to watch these things, to be the eye of responsibility, to witness the last unwilling moments of other human beings on earth, especially disturbing when you are a member of a persecuted group. But millions watched the video of George Floyd’s killing. This may be one of the main reasons why the police officers who murdered him were held accountable.
I work in journalism, so I don’t really have a choice to watch or not watch. I’m here to tell you: you can watch this. In fact, you should pay attention to it.
On the one hand, it’s disturbing, but not as graphic as the Floyd video (at least, not in the gory, intimate sense). It’s the sounds, not the visuals, that will haunt you here. It shows police rushing towards the car, and it shows the car driving away and then careening to the side of the road as it crashed. I had to watch it several times to understand when the shooting happened and who fired it. There’s a lot of horrible screaming in the background, which is the stuff of nightmares, but you can get the idea by watching it on mute (if that’s the kind of thing that helps you endure it).
But it’s also very clarifying in terms of the specific extent of the DHS statement’s inaccuracy. Of course, yes, the video was shot in less than a minute. Maybe some facts will come out later that will make people more convinced that this guy is a threat – maybe. What happened next was a head-scratcher. Given the federal government’s initial attitude — and President Donald Trump’s more general stance on treating the Justice Department as his plaything — it would be ludicrous to expect the federal government to conduct an impartial investigation into this incident. The public should put pressure on local authorities to conduct such investigations. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara assured reporters that the FBI is working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension on the investigation and “their involvement is to investigate whether any state laws were violated within the state of Minnesota.” If it is determined that state and local officials committed a crime here, there will be many obstacles to justice – although O’Hara has repeatedly referred to the shooting site as a “crime scene” – but we need to at least make that effort in the pursuit of justice.
To a larger extent, I think it’s pretty clear what this 47-second video shows. This is not a “gotta shoot and kill” moment.
Despite its clarity, the narrative emerges quickly. The New York Times’ live blog about the situation, for example, makes it seem as if the facts can only be determined by triangulating the narratives of the various authorities involved here: the Department of Homeland Security on the one hand, and the city’s mayor on the other. But you don’t need to triangulate between these so-called official accounts. All you have to do is watch the video.
There is another reason why you should watch this video. We currently live in a truly upside-down universe, one in which you cannot trust your government to accurately describe what is going on in the world. Of course, yes, this has been happening for a long time because of governments, let alone the United States government. But we live in a particularly harmful moment, where we currently live with a government willing to lie directly to our faces about things we have seen with our own eyes. That said, Trump apparently watched the video today as well, and as is his custom, he live-streamed his explanation on a giant wall of text. After claiming the slain woman was “clearly a professional agitator,” he claimed she “violently, intentionally, viciously ran over an ICE officer” and that it was “hard to believe he was still alive.”
But no one was hit by the car. In the video, the officer who fired the shot can be seen calmly walking toward the woman he had just shot.
So: Your federal government has begun to play up what happened this morning, trying to defend the dead woman as a dangerous protester and the ICE agents who suppressed her as heroes. As Frey, another government official, said, “Watching my own video, I want to tell you straight up: That’s bullshit.” Which government official should you trust? Well, in this case, you don’t have to decide. You can only trust your own eyes.
