The Right Way: Top of the News

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Top of the News

The Renee Good Shooting: Follow the Bouncing Narrative

It’s been a challenge to keep up with the shifting narratives in the death of Renee Good, the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week.

We were first told she was just a young mom who was not involved in any organized effort to impede ICE operations, and that she was merely trying to make a U-turn when she was senselessly murdered by an ICE agent (a curious claim given that Portland Avenue, where the shooting occurred, is a one-way street). This gave way to the admission that she was indeed actively harassing ICE agents before she was killed, but the shooting was nonetheless unwarranted because Good’s Honda Pilot had not struck the agent who shot her. Then, as additional videos emerged showing the Pilot striking the agent, the narrative changed yet again. Okay, we were told, the Pilot hit him, but not that hard, and it was his own fault because he shouldn’t have been standing there in the first place.

More information has come to light since I wrote about the case last week, the accumulation of which has served to put the lie to claims that Good was “murdered” and that the shooting was utterly without legal justification. CNN has assembled a timeline of the shooting using the videos available thus far, and though I would quibble with some of CNN reporter Kyung Lah’s narration, the videos offer a fairly complete look at how the event unfolded.

In debating the shooting with a friend on X this week, I said I didn’t think I would have fired at Good because I would not have been standing in the path of her car. But now that the agent’s cellphone video and that of bystanders and nearby security cameras have been made public, we can see that the agent was to the right of Good’s car until she backed up and changed directions, thereby putting him in front of it. To repeat a passage from the U.S. Supreme Court case of Graham v. Connor, which I cited in my last column, “The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” In a matter of a second or two, the agent went from being safely out Good’s path to being directly in it.

I can recall several moments in my police career in which I found myself in tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving circumstances, in the aftermath of which and upon calm reflection I realized I had not been standing in the most advantageous and tactically sound positions. It happens, and I am fortunate to have avoided being killed or killing someone else.