For myself, based on the facts currently available, I take the same stance on Good as I did on Babbitt: I don't know that I would have taken the shot, but I will not criticize the officer for doing so, given the situation.
What’s really incredible is that I never heard of Ashley Babbitt, or at least forgot about her. I remember an officer dying a few days later that people were tying in, but not her. I’m a Republican too, so you think I would have heard about it from a Republican friend, but Substack didn’t have Notes at that point, and I disconnected from News sites and social media after Kavanaugh’s hearing. It’s insane that something like that happened and I was unaware. I seriously thought you were talking about Good the whole time and had to google Babbitt.
More to the point of your article, my opinion on Good is that the Officer should be fired, but not charged with Murder. I’d have to look closely at Minnesota’s manslaughter statutes to know if one of them apply. In my quick google on Babbitt, it looks like the same thing should have happened to that officer, and I am disappointed to see he was promoted, not fired. I expect the same thing will happen to Good’s killer at the end of the day.
Sending someone afraid for their life to prison because they reacted poorly feels unjust to me, but that doesn’t mean we should ever trust you with a gun and a badge again.
This very much mirrors my sentiments as a deep-blue south Minneapolis-ite as well. Fired and condemned as “allowed-but-wrong”. Not persecuted and not held up as an example for others.
Immediately in the wake of Jan 6 I commented something to the effect of "I am glad Babbitt was killed," which was probably too strong but it's what I said. My true sentiment was "I am glad that no congressmen were harmed and it seems like shooting Babbitt was a contributing factor in that."
I am not glad Good was killed but I give the ICE agent the benefit of the doubt that he believed that he was acting in self defense. I give the lions-share of the blame to those who have been actively raising the temperature against ICE, lying about what they are allowed to do, and acting like ICE is not a real federal agency but a collection of racist loose cannons.
"Many others had recently gotten away with worse, and she knew that."
This. A lack of proper response to illegal protesting behaviors has eroded the law. This has been done by both sides.
Both sides are also ramping up rhetoric to crazy levels (e.g. Frey, Walz and Trump) for their own personal gain and are costing people their lives, both through killings and, more subtly but much more prevalent, through causing people to continue to live through fear which is still a form of losing your life, IMHO. We have begun to confuse leadership and bravery with self-serving narcissism.
A well-measured post. And, an excellent rhetorical blurring of the partisan signs.
With regards to your footnote about times when it's appropriate to resist a peaceful arrest, my immediate reaction is that when you're in the resistance in Nazi Germany, and the Literal Nazis are probably going to kill you after a show trial, then you're justified. Unfortunately, given what too much the country thinks about our current government, that true statement sounds somewhat ominous.
Yes, agreed, my statement only applies in places where an arrest is actually an arrest in the Anglo-American sense of the word: the first stage in criminal due process. In jurisdictions where that's not the case -- and there are many the world over -- many bets are off. (And you're right about the last sentence, too.)
NIce how you led off about Ashley Babbit as though she were Renee Good. Point well taken.
I regularly do sidewalk counseling at a local abortion facility. As part of how I was trained, I do not block cars and people entering and leaving the facility. My purpose, and the purpose of those I work with, is peaceful persiasion and prayerful protest. Sometimes, that persuasion results in women changing their minds. I hope I would feel the same way about similar protests regarding causes I disagree with.
I do not agree with violent protests, no matter the cause, nor with "civil disobedience" protests that resist the legal consequences. I hoep I would feel th3 same way ab out any causee, whether I agree or disagree.
Thanks for this, James! You are much better read than I, so I imagine you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" where he explains and documents this phenomenon of cognitive bias. We make an initial decision about a situation by intuition, and after that we're drawn to the accounts that justify it after the fact and defending against the accounts that call it into question. (Less validly, he concluded that Hume was right about the source of our moral judgments being in sentiment, and Plato was wrong about them being in attention to the eternal Forms. Plato was not trying to describe how people make these judgments now, but explaining how they SHOULD do so. Not every great social psychologist is also a good philosopher.) As for me and the current case, I can't figure out what I'm looking at when I try to watch those videos...
I’d like to add a third datapoint in here as well. The “2020 Riots/Uprising” (depending on your aisle) and specifically the sacking of Minneapolis’s 3rd Precinct Police Station.
Had the police officers elected to try and hold the building they would have been justified in using lethal force against the mob trying to break in. It would have been an even-more-awful outcome to a story that ended awfully anyway with the building being burned to a husk. The officers at the time elected to remove themselves from the situation and monitor from afar instead of staying in an environment which risked tripping over into lethal outcomes.
I hope those officers who made those decisions are held up as examples to others because that’s the sort of preservation-of-life decisions I want my officers to make. There are endless heroic stories from J6 of officers holding the line without resorting to lethal force, those are the ones I want to use as examples for others. Not the shooting of Babbitt. Not the shooting of Good.
In the face of terrible circumstances, I want to expect the best from the subgroup of our population we’ve asked to keep the peace and enforce our laws.
I also had not heard of Babbitt, but the parallel is indeed instructive. Thank you!
I pray for the repose of both their souls. It’s truly tragic that “they must be made into martyrdoms or domestic terrorism. If the truth gets in the way of that, the truth will have to go.”
A quibble on footnote 2. You'd need to show that the spread in supporting the protests are statistically significant to make the claim that one group is generally more favorable towards protests. And since so many things fail to replicate, you'd ideally have multiple experiments replicating this result to be extra sure.
Even though it's a very plausible result there's all sorts of plausible papers that have failed to replicate.
I'm used to the world of polling, where, by convention, statistical significance is less rigid than academia, and I must admit that I simply eyeballed the numbers and the sample size and said, "yep, looks true enough." Very risky on my part, in retrospect!
I haven't quite figured out how to articulate this, so this is more trying to suss it out and not make a specific argument:
It seems like one factor that is very different here is the setting and the disposition of the mob surrounding both of our victims and the LEOs involved. Babbitt and the Jan 6 crowd obviously believed something illegal and destructive to the Republic was happening but they were also trespassing on government property, amassed as a HUGE crowd, and were chanting about killing elected officials. (Didn't they erect a gallows? Or did I misremember that when it was just a threat?) The LEOs on scene did not have a history with the crowd of viciousness, aggressiveness or the perception of showing up to disrupt a community. It seems like the situation on Jan 6 is really weighted -- at least on a gut level for me -- against the insurrectionists and in favor of the LEOs, regardless of why anyone was there and their beliefs about the certification of the election. I think the protesters really could have killed not just one, but many people that day, and it is a miracle it didn't devolve.
You're right that the media is painting all ICE activities as the beginnings of the American Gestapo, so I have tried to think clearly about what ICE is doing knowing most of what I am being shown is biased. However, something still sits so very wrong for me, especially in opposition to January 6. First, while protesters have definitely been extremely aggressive, there is a major disparity between the ICE officers, who seem to be armed to the teeth, and protestors throwing shit at them and whistling in their faces and mouthing off. Obviously, ongoing exposure to a bunch of people interfering with your job and threatening you is wearing, but when there is such a difference in power due to level of armament, I am skeptical in favor of the protestors. Being a dick to a cop isn't grounds for execution. (I understand that Good doesn't look like she was following orders, which is dangerous, but it also looked like she got conflicting orders from different agents.) As far I understand, the group in MPLS on the 7th wasn't huge, and no one was credibly threatening to kill the officers (though I might be wrong). Even if they did threaten, there weren't enough of them, and they weren't sufficiently armed, to truly win that fight; do we really think those ICE agents would have taken any real losses if they had been rushed? The Jan 6 protesters probably could have done so much damage with a little more willingness to be violent based just on numbers. I guess you could argue that Good could have run over the officer, but he seemed to have sufficient space to simply move slightly to the side and not get hit, and how fast could she possibly accelerate at a 45 degree angle on a residential street?
And finally, regardless of the legality of ICE's actions, it is obvious that the administration's goal is to incite fear. They are coming into communities masked and tackling people in the street. They've taken parents and left their children alone without bothering to communicate that it happened to any authority who could help those kids. Actions this aggressive, this ordered towards fear and a show of power, make me uneasy with a 1:1 comparison with Jan 6.
I do always, ALWAYS, ask myself when viewing protesters whether I would be aggravated or proud of them if they were protesting something I felt about deeply. That's why I usually gave BLM a lot of leeway; I had many irritating interactions with individuals in the movement, but I admired their willingness to put themselves in harm's way for their cause. I think many people believe ICE's actions may be legal, but inhumane in action, and I am willing to give them the same generosity I would give an anti-abortion activist who is aggressively fighting our current abortion laws, even when they kind of suck.
Again, me trying to work out why this feels so different and awful from Jan 6, which was also awful but not the same.
(Nods) This is good.
For myself, based on the facts currently available, I take the same stance on Good as I did on Babbitt: I don't know that I would have taken the shot, but I will not criticize the officer for doing so, given the situation.
What’s really incredible is that I never heard of Ashley Babbitt, or at least forgot about her. I remember an officer dying a few days later that people were tying in, but not her. I’m a Republican too, so you think I would have heard about it from a Republican friend, but Substack didn’t have Notes at that point, and I disconnected from News sites and social media after Kavanaugh’s hearing. It’s insane that something like that happened and I was unaware. I seriously thought you were talking about Good the whole time and had to google Babbitt.
More to the point of your article, my opinion on Good is that the Officer should be fired, but not charged with Murder. I’d have to look closely at Minnesota’s manslaughter statutes to know if one of them apply. In my quick google on Babbitt, it looks like the same thing should have happened to that officer, and I am disappointed to see he was promoted, not fired. I expect the same thing will happen to Good’s killer at the end of the day.
Sending someone afraid for their life to prison because they reacted poorly feels unjust to me, but that doesn’t mean we should ever trust you with a gun and a badge again.
This very much mirrors my sentiments as a deep-blue south Minneapolis-ite as well. Fired and condemned as “allowed-but-wrong”. Not persecuted and not held up as an example for others.
Immediately in the wake of Jan 6 I commented something to the effect of "I am glad Babbitt was killed," which was probably too strong but it's what I said. My true sentiment was "I am glad that no congressmen were harmed and it seems like shooting Babbitt was a contributing factor in that."
I am not glad Good was killed but I give the ICE agent the benefit of the doubt that he believed that he was acting in self defense. I give the lions-share of the blame to those who have been actively raising the temperature against ICE, lying about what they are allowed to do, and acting like ICE is not a real federal agency but a collection of racist loose cannons.
"Many others had recently gotten away with worse, and she knew that."
This. A lack of proper response to illegal protesting behaviors has eroded the law. This has been done by both sides.
Both sides are also ramping up rhetoric to crazy levels (e.g. Frey, Walz and Trump) for their own personal gain and are costing people their lives, both through killings and, more subtly but much more prevalent, through causing people to continue to live through fear which is still a form of losing your life, IMHO. We have begun to confuse leadership and bravery with self-serving narcissism.
*Prays harder*
Oh goddammit, you if-by-whiskied me. You LINKED to the if-by-whiskey speech and you still successfully if-by-whiskied me!
A well-measured post. And, an excellent rhetorical blurring of the partisan signs.
With regards to your footnote about times when it's appropriate to resist a peaceful arrest, my immediate reaction is that when you're in the resistance in Nazi Germany, and the Literal Nazis are probably going to kill you after a show trial, then you're justified. Unfortunately, given what too much the country thinks about our current government, that true statement sounds somewhat ominous.
Yes, agreed, my statement only applies in places where an arrest is actually an arrest in the Anglo-American sense of the word: the first stage in criminal due process. In jurisdictions where that's not the case -- and there are many the world over -- many bets are off. (And you're right about the last sentence, too.)
NIce how you led off about Ashley Babbit as though she were Renee Good. Point well taken.
I regularly do sidewalk counseling at a local abortion facility. As part of how I was trained, I do not block cars and people entering and leaving the facility. My purpose, and the purpose of those I work with, is peaceful persiasion and prayerful protest. Sometimes, that persuasion results in women changing their minds. I hope I would feel the same way about similar protests regarding causes I disagree with.
I do not agree with violent protests, no matter the cause, nor with "civil disobedience" protests that resist the legal consequences. I hoep I would feel th3 same way ab out any causee, whether I agree or disagree.
Thanks for this, James! You are much better read than I, so I imagine you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" where he explains and documents this phenomenon of cognitive bias. We make an initial decision about a situation by intuition, and after that we're drawn to the accounts that justify it after the fact and defending against the accounts that call it into question. (Less validly, he concluded that Hume was right about the source of our moral judgments being in sentiment, and Plato was wrong about them being in attention to the eternal Forms. Plato was not trying to describe how people make these judgments now, but explaining how they SHOULD do so. Not every great social psychologist is also a good philosopher.) As for me and the current case, I can't figure out what I'm looking at when I try to watch those videos...
I’d like to add a third datapoint in here as well. The “2020 Riots/Uprising” (depending on your aisle) and specifically the sacking of Minneapolis’s 3rd Precinct Police Station.
Had the police officers elected to try and hold the building they would have been justified in using lethal force against the mob trying to break in. It would have been an even-more-awful outcome to a story that ended awfully anyway with the building being burned to a husk. The officers at the time elected to remove themselves from the situation and monitor from afar instead of staying in an environment which risked tripping over into lethal outcomes.
I hope those officers who made those decisions are held up as examples to others because that’s the sort of preservation-of-life decisions I want my officers to make. There are endless heroic stories from J6 of officers holding the line without resorting to lethal force, those are the ones I want to use as examples for others. Not the shooting of Babbitt. Not the shooting of Good.
In the face of terrible circumstances, I want to expect the best from the subgroup of our population we’ve asked to keep the peace and enforce our laws.
One note here--the officers at the police station had time to think about their response. The officer in Good's case did not.
I also had not heard of Babbitt, but the parallel is indeed instructive. Thank you!
I pray for the repose of both their souls. It’s truly tragic that “they must be made into martyrdoms or domestic terrorism. If the truth gets in the way of that, the truth will have to go.”
A quibble on footnote 2. You'd need to show that the spread in supporting the protests are statistically significant to make the claim that one group is generally more favorable towards protests. And since so many things fail to replicate, you'd ideally have multiple experiments replicating this result to be extra sure.
Even though it's a very plausible result there's all sorts of plausible papers that have failed to replicate.
Quibble(s) accepted!
I'm used to the world of polling, where, by convention, statistical significance is less rigid than academia, and I must admit that I simply eyeballed the numbers and the sample size and said, "yep, looks true enough." Very risky on my part, in retrospect!
I haven't quite figured out how to articulate this, so this is more trying to suss it out and not make a specific argument:
It seems like one factor that is very different here is the setting and the disposition of the mob surrounding both of our victims and the LEOs involved. Babbitt and the Jan 6 crowd obviously believed something illegal and destructive to the Republic was happening but they were also trespassing on government property, amassed as a HUGE crowd, and were chanting about killing elected officials. (Didn't they erect a gallows? Or did I misremember that when it was just a threat?) The LEOs on scene did not have a history with the crowd of viciousness, aggressiveness or the perception of showing up to disrupt a community. It seems like the situation on Jan 6 is really weighted -- at least on a gut level for me -- against the insurrectionists and in favor of the LEOs, regardless of why anyone was there and their beliefs about the certification of the election. I think the protesters really could have killed not just one, but many people that day, and it is a miracle it didn't devolve.
You're right that the media is painting all ICE activities as the beginnings of the American Gestapo, so I have tried to think clearly about what ICE is doing knowing most of what I am being shown is biased. However, something still sits so very wrong for me, especially in opposition to January 6. First, while protesters have definitely been extremely aggressive, there is a major disparity between the ICE officers, who seem to be armed to the teeth, and protestors throwing shit at them and whistling in their faces and mouthing off. Obviously, ongoing exposure to a bunch of people interfering with your job and threatening you is wearing, but when there is such a difference in power due to level of armament, I am skeptical in favor of the protestors. Being a dick to a cop isn't grounds for execution. (I understand that Good doesn't look like she was following orders, which is dangerous, but it also looked like she got conflicting orders from different agents.) As far I understand, the group in MPLS on the 7th wasn't huge, and no one was credibly threatening to kill the officers (though I might be wrong). Even if they did threaten, there weren't enough of them, and they weren't sufficiently armed, to truly win that fight; do we really think those ICE agents would have taken any real losses if they had been rushed? The Jan 6 protesters probably could have done so much damage with a little more willingness to be violent based just on numbers. I guess you could argue that Good could have run over the officer, but he seemed to have sufficient space to simply move slightly to the side and not get hit, and how fast could she possibly accelerate at a 45 degree angle on a residential street?
And finally, regardless of the legality of ICE's actions, it is obvious that the administration's goal is to incite fear. They are coming into communities masked and tackling people in the street. They've taken parents and left their children alone without bothering to communicate that it happened to any authority who could help those kids. Actions this aggressive, this ordered towards fear and a show of power, make me uneasy with a 1:1 comparison with Jan 6.
I do always, ALWAYS, ask myself when viewing protesters whether I would be aggravated or proud of them if they were protesting something I felt about deeply. That's why I usually gave BLM a lot of leeway; I had many irritating interactions with individuals in the movement, but I admired their willingness to put themselves in harm's way for their cause. I think many people believe ICE's actions may be legal, but inhumane in action, and I am willing to give them the same generosity I would give an anti-abortion activist who is aggressively fighting our current abortion laws, even when they kind of suck.
Again, me trying to work out why this feels so different and awful from Jan 6, which was also awful but not the same.