On the shooting of Renee Good

Everybody seems to have an opinion on the shooting of Renee Good, and I’m no exception, but I wanted to think about this a bit before posting. Also, I’m out of practice and don’t write as fast as I used to.

I’ll start with three important points that shouldn’t be controversial

1. The ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good. I haven’t seen anyone try to deny this, but it seems pretty obvious that his actions caused her death. Unless someone has truly amazing evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume Renee Good’s manner of death was homicide by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross.
2. What makes this contentious is the issue of self defense. Supporters of the Ross, and presumably Ross himself, are claiming the homicide was justified as an act of self defense: He feared for his life, and he had to shoot her to protect his life. In particular, he shot because he believed she was trying to kill or seriously injure him by striking him with her car.
3. Years of reading about shootings and watching videos have taught me that self defense is a very fact sensitive issue. As the story breaks in the news, the issue of whether or not the shooting was legitimate self-defense can hinge on important facts that may not have been revealed by early reports or videos.

To my way of thinking, shootings like this usually end up in one of three broad categories: Righteous, excusable, or criminal.

• Righteous Shooting: A righteous shooting is one that was the right thing to do given the actual facts. If the same situation arose again, we would want the same action taken. Example: True self-defense, such as shooting an attacker to stop an imminent threat to innocent life.
• Criminal Shooting: A criminal shooting is a straightforward crime, such as intentionally or carelessly shooting an innocent person.
• Excusable Shooting: An excusable shooting occurs when the shooter did not behave criminally, but we still wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. This often involves a reasonable belief that turns out to be wrong. Example: A man is robbing someone at gunpoint, and a police officer shoots him dead, but it later turns out the gun was a realistic fake. The world would be a better place if the officer had not killed an unarmed man, but the officer did nothing wrong.

(Although some legal systems have similar categories, these are not legal definitions. In particular, criminal law generally does not distinguish between what I’m calling righteous and excusable shootings.)

I think the most crucial issue is whether Renee Good was trying to hit Agent Ross with her car. If she was, then the debate is mostly over^[1]Technically, the true test of self-defense is whether Ross believed Good was trying to hit him. If she tried to kill him and he didn’t know it, then he can’t claim self-defense. It’s the same as if a homicidal maniac entered a bus station and shot the first person he saw in the head. Even if it later turns out his victim was wearing an explosive suicide vest and was seconds away from killing everyone in the station, that’s still not self-defense. You can’t … Continue reading, and it was a righteous self-defense shooting.

But honestly, I just can’t see it. Too many things about this incident argue against her intentionally trying to hit Agent Ross:

• I’m not aware of anything about Good’s background to indicate that she had violent tendencies. It would be unusual for someone to go from a history of non-violence to murder of a federal officer without a lot of smaller violent incidents along the way.
• If Good was going to kill an ICE agent, she chose to do it by running him over (a) in her own car, easily traced to her, (b) at slow speed, (c) while surrounded by witnesses, (d) and armed federal agents. That would be one of the stupidest murder attempts ever.
• Agent Ross was standing to the left of the car’s centerline, but Good clearly steered the car to the right. That’s not something you do if you want to run someone over. I’ve seen videos of police officers intentionally striking armed bad guys with their patrol cars, and they always hit them straight on. It’s what anybody would do. You steer in the direction you want to go. And she steered away.

And yet, in some of the videos, it looks like Ross has some kind of interaction with the vehicle. So what the heck happened?

The only way I can make sense of the evidence I’ve seen so far ^[2]An important caveat for this entire piece. is that Good was upset by the other ICE agent who was trying to get her out of her car, so she tried to drive away. Meanwhile, agent Ross was approaching her car from the right side. It looks like he crosses in front of her car while she’s distracted by backing up and then reaching down to shift into Drive. Then she stepped on the gas before she realized that agent Ross had moved.

In one of the videos, Ross draws his weapon as the car starts to roll forward. Our view of him is obscured, but his weight seems to come off his feet for a fraction of a second just before he fires his first shot. I’m guessing that Ross had pushed off the car with his hand to get away from it. I can’t tell if he would have taken a solid hit if he hadn’t done that.

A few complications:

Wasn’t she blocking traffic? Isn’t that a crime? It looks like she was parked sideways across at least one lane, which would probably be a violation of some kind. Nevertheless, breaking minor traffic laws does not justify lethal force.

She tried to drive away after an ICE Agent told her to get out of the car. Isn’t that a crime? That’s what it looked like to me, and I’m sure it’s a crime. I’ve heard others claim that another agent was ordering her to leave, but I haven’t seen any good evidence. In any case, absconding alone does not justify lethal force.

If you’re with me so far, then we’ve eliminated the possibility of this being a righteous shooting. It’s either a tragedy or a crime.

Should Ross have been in front of her car? Isn’t there a policy about that? Many police agencies have a rule against stopping someone in a car by standing in front of it. (Those that don’t have the rule probably think their officers would never be that stupid.) But I’m not sure that’s what happened here. Ross was just wandering around her car, documenting the encounter on his phone when another ICE agent showed up on the scene and started trying to get Gold out of her car. This turned it into a traffic stop, with Agent Ross badly positioned in front of her vehicle while the other agent was trying to get her out of the car. The newly-arrived ICE agent had escalated the situation, to the detriment of everyone involved.

How much could Ross have feared for his life if he didn’t even drop his cell phone? This is a training issue. Cops are trained to shoot with both hands on the gun because it’s faster and more accurate. The problem is, lots of cops find themselves in a shooting situation while holding something in their off hand, and the internet is full of videos of cops shooting one-handed while trying to figure out what to do with their other hand. Most of their training started with both hands empty, so when the gunfight starts and their brains are running in fight-or-flight mode they don’t know what to do with the other hand. They fumble around, or they try to put their radio or flashlight back in place on their uniform in the middle of a shootout. Ross had probably always been careful not to drop his phone, and in the stress of the moment, he couldn’t change that.

What about the second and third shots fired through the side window of the car? Even if the first shot could be justified as self-defense, the shots into the driver from the side clearly cannot be self-defense because the car was no longer an immediate threat. However, human reaction time plays a role. Cops these days are trained to start shooting when they perceive a threat to their lives and keep shooting until they perceive the threat is over, and both starting and stopping are subject to a normal human delay of about a half-second or so between perception and behavior. Ross’s shots were about a third of a second apart, so once he perceived the threat was over, he could still end up shooting one or two more times before he was able to stop.

What does the autopsy tell us? The Hennepin County medical examiner has not released a full report yet, but Renee Good’s family had a private autopsy performed, and it reveals that she was shot three times^[3]There is a fourth grazing injury which did not cause significant harm.: One bullet hit her left forearm, which seems to correspond to the bullet hole in her windshield, making it the first shot. Another bullet hit her right breast, which seems plausibly to be the second shot. Neither of those wounds would have been immediately life threatening. The final bullet struck her left temple and exited on the opposite side of her skull. This was the killing shot.

Agent Ross apparently called her a “fucking bitch” after shooting her. Doesn’t that imply he shot out of anger? Well, if we believe him that he feared for his life, then I’m not surprised he called her a “fucking bitch” for trying to run him over. All it tells us is that Ross was angry. Angry enough to kill? Or angry because he was almost killed? It works either way, so it’s not helpful.

So it seems…plausible…that Agent Ross feared for his life and shot her in self-defense. Except…

The biggest problem I have with Agent Ross’s behavior can be illustrated by this question: “Agent Ross, you’ve said that when you saw the car start to move you feared for you life. Can you tell me what you hoped to accomplish by shooting the driver?”

I don’t think he can come up with a reasonable answer. The car is only about 5 feet away from him as it begins to move toward him. Even creeping along at a walking pace of 3 miles per hour, the front bumper would close the distance and hit him in about one second. That’s right at the human reaction limit: A well-trained expert can respond to a stimulus and fire an aimed shot in about 1 second. So by the time the bullet hit her, the car would have hit him. Shooting would not have protected him. The car could easily hit him before he finished pulling the trigger.^[4]Having access to the car would likely yield more evidence about the bullets’ paths, but the feds reportedly took it away. In fact, that’s what I see in the video: The car hits Ross before he fires by at least half a second.

And then there’s the problem that killing the driver doesn’t stop the car. A dead driver’s foot might slip off the gas pedal, but it’s never going to hit the brake. So the car is always going to keep right on rolling. I’ve seen least two other shooting videos where that happened. And that’s what happens here: The car rolls past Agent Ross and down the street. After a second or two, Good’s body must have slid down and put pressure on the gas pedal, because you can hear the engine rev up as the car accelerates into a parked vehicle.

Shooting the driver did nothing to stop the car and never could have. Instead it created a danger for other people nearby as the car careened out of control.

So why did Ross open fire? I think the answer falls into one of four categories:

1. Fixation: He had drawn his gun, and when the stress reaction took over, all he could think of was to shoot his gun.
2. Training: He’s been trained to shoot at people who threaten his life, and that’s what he did, even if it couldn’t possibly be effective.
3. Anger: He was pissed off at Good and wanted some payback. The “fucking bitch” remark shows that Ross was clearly angry, but as I argued above, that doesn’t prove murder.
4. Calculation: Standing in front of a car — but just far enough to the side to get out of the way — can give a cop an excuse to kill someone. Border Patrol has a history of such abuses.

With the evidence I’m aware of — much less than would be available to an official investigation — I find it difficult to distinguish between these scenarios. When I first started writing this, I was inclined to think this was more likely to be a mistake than a murder. But then the autopsy results came out, revealing that only the final shot was fatal, and my judgement flipped. Previously, I had speculated that Ross kept shooting until his brain processed the fact that the threat had passed. But now I find myself wondering if Ross kept shooting until he got the fatal headshot he was trying for. I have no way to know, but it’s a haunting thought.

In any case, I think either Ross made a mistake or shot her on purpose. Neither is excusable. And one thing I am confident about is that Renee Good would not have died if ICE hadn’t been there.

Note: I found this analysis by use-of-force expert John Correia to be useful in writing this post.