“Who, whom?”
It’s a famous formulation, originally attributed to Vladimir Lenin. It is a formula that abjures any principle in favor of raw power: Actions are justified not by abstract rules but because they are done by the right people, for the right people and to the wrong people.
Clearly, this is a formula for a police state, not a democracy where we are all equal before the law and where government power rests on the consent of the governed. But though we ought to know better, “Who, whom?” thinking pops up in democracies all the time.
In 2012, a group of law professors published the results of an experiment they had run on 202 adults who were shown a video of protesters. Participants were given the text of a law regarding protests at sensitive facilities and asked to determine whether the police had been justified in shutting down the protest.
Half were told that the video showed pro-life demonstrators at an abortion clinic. The other half were told the protest occurred outside a college career-placement office where military recruiters were conducting interviews, and that the protesters were rallying against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay and lesbian service members. The results were depressing, if not entirely surprising.
People disposed to support abortion rights and oppose “don’t ask, don’t tell” thought the police were justified in clearing protesters away from the abortion clinic but not the recruitment office. Those whose views went the other way reached the opposite conclusion from the same facts.
The internet has let us run real-life versions of this experiment several times: Kyle Rittenhouse, Covington Catholic High School and, now, the shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Every time, the debate has devolved into warring camps who know what they saw and hate their opponents for disbelieving their own eyes.
Obviously, fallible humans will never get entirely beyond questions of who and whom, especially since the questions occasionally matter. Cops have powers the rest of us don’t, so it’s important to know whether someone breaking into a house is a police officer before you tackle them — just as it’s reasonable for police to treat a cartel enforcer as more dangerous than a Midwestern grandmother.
But beyond a certain point, “Who, whom?” is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether Renée Good was a mother, a poet and a nice person, nor does it matter whether she was illegally hindering operations of ICE officers by blocking their vehicles, a tactic I disapprove of strongly but does not merit the death penalty. It doesn’t matter whether the operation was necessary or immoral. It doesn’t even matter whether she was fleeing the scene or disobeying orders — they had her license plate and could have arrested her at home. What matters is whether that officer reasonably believed she was a threat to him or other people.
We should not let this incident polarize us into a debate over whether cops are the good guys or the bad guys, as happened after George Floyd’s murder. We all have an interest in public order, which is why the “defund the police” movement was so misguided. But we also have an interest in regulating police power, because none of us wants to be in a world where we can be shot for failing to perfectly comply. We need police. But we also need guardrails to keep police power from being abused, which means we need to recognize that law enforcement officers are neither angels nor demons, always wrong or always right. They’re fallible human beings who have been given a tough job and awesome power.
Sometimes they will reasonably fire even though later analysis will show that the shooting was mistaken or avoidable. And sometimes they will fire unreasonably, because if you give guns and authority to hundreds of thousands of officers, some of them will turn out to be bad people, or bad decision-makers. For the public’s safety and the legitimacy of the police, that latter group must be held accountable.
Trying to separate the “what” from the “who,” I confess I am struggling to see what conservatives believe is obvious: that officer Jonathan Ross had good reason to believe Good was trying to hurt him with her car.
I’ve watched all the videos I can find in slow motion and in real time, and I see a man filming with his phone at the corner of a car making a K-turn, and may have knocked into him as it moved. Ross seems to be leaning over the hood from a side angle to put the first shot through the windshield and firing the second and third shots into the car from the side, which makes it hard to believe that he thought the car was aimed at him or anyone else. The road appears clear behind him.
That’s not the final word, of course; though a news outlet disseminated his cellphone footage, his body-cam video, if it exists, hasn’t been released. Further investigation and more videos may reveal additional details. Unfortunately, we’ve become so polarized on the “who” that I no longer trust this administration — which immediately deemed Good a “domestic terrorist” — to adjudicate the “what.” And that is even more troubling to me than the death of Renée Good.
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