Justice for Renee Nicole Good, one way or another

There’s something we need to talk about before talking about anything else related to Renee Nicole Good’s murder. It's that the likelihood of convicting her killer is very low.

No matter how damning you may think the video evidence is – and it is indeed damning – Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Renee Nicole Good in the face, is still a cop. 

Put that with another fact – this is America. Together, these facts paint a picture of the difficulty of bringing Jonathan Ross to justice. Ross is a cop. America reveres cops. Convicting a cop of any wrongdoing, much less murder, is an enormous task.

“It’s like trying to convict Jesus,” Ken White, an attorney, said.

“If you think it is obvious that the videos prove murder and nobody can say otherwise, your view is based on how you want the system to be, not how it is,” he said. “It will be brutally hard, fighting inch by inch against what America is, to convict Jonathan Ross. Your feelings don’t enter into it.”

And that’s under normal circumstances. 

These circumstances are not normal.

First, because Ross fled the scene of the crime. Second, the FBI barred state investigators from accessing evidence. Third, there have been reports of federal agents entering the Minneapolis home of Jonathan Ross and removing stuff. Fourth, Homeland Security has “shadow units” standing by to destroy evidence of crimes done by immigration officials.

That’s on top of relentless and malicious lying by the government. As Stephen Colbert said on Friday, the message is the administration has the sole authority to determine the truth. Well, looks like it's also going to try making sure no one has any evidence to prove them wrong.

Oh, and then there’s the misdirection.

That’s the point of the video of the shooting taken by Ross that he appears to have leaked. (See above.) I guess he believes it shows he was forced to shoot in self-defense. What it does is reinforce conclusions drawn from analyzing the original videos, including this key detail flagged by the Post: “Ross crosses in front of the vehicle as it moves in reverse.”

From there, he took a stance, aimed and fired.

I don’t mean to be cynical. My intent is to be realistic. This is the country we have. Accountability for Jonathan Ross is going to be as difficult as accountability for the man at the top, Donald Trump, who is ultimately responsible for setting this crime wave in motion. 

That doesn’t mean good people shouldn’t try. State and local prosecutors, though they are at a disadvantage without the aid and cooperation of the FBI, still opened an investigation Friday, asking the wider public for any evidence it might have.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, moderate Democrats are experiencing something rare: a spine. Some are moving toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. (Hakeem Jeffries called her “a stone-cold liar.” He did not endorse her impeachment, but notably did not rule it out.) Other Democrats have raised the question of whether they’ll vote to continue funding ICE. On the margins are those wanting to abolish it.

For everyone else, there’s democratic politics. The most important thing right now is gathering and disseminating video evidence of abuses of power by ICE for the purpose of discrediting not only Trump but all federal authorities in the eyes of the public.

Gathering and disseminating that evidence won’t be too hard, and not only because everyone has a smart phone. According to an editor at the Star-Tribune, locals feel like they’re under siege. “Not an exaggeration at all to say that the feeling in Minneapolis is that the entire metro area is being treated as occupied territory by federal agents. Impossible to overstate how overwhelmingly people here do not like it. This does not feel sustainable.”

Indeed, something seems to be shifting. 

Whereas the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, took weeks to grow into a national narrative, the murder of Renee Nicole Good, a widowed, white and blond-haired mother of three, who had stuffed animals in the glove box, whose wife wailed in despair and whose dog needed its leash, has triggered a virtually instantaneous backlash. And it's snowballing.

America is still a majority white country and a lot of those white people, especially white women, are apparently seeing themselves in Renee Nicole Good. It’s to the point that even respectable, middle-class white people appear to be asking themselves if their local cops are going to protect them against ICE or if they’re going to take Donald Trump’s side.

Those doubts and fears are deepened every time ICE is captured on video showing Americans what it claims to be the true meaning of law and order: Comply or die. 

Indeed, ICE officers appear to altogether believe that they were teaching the American people a lesson with the murder of Renee Nicole Good.

As this ICE officer tells a woman who is filming him:

“Have you not learned?” (Then he grabs her phone.)

My point here is not to be cynical of the likelihood of Ross seeing the inside of a jail cell. That could happen, but as Ken White suggested, only if state prosecutors are very careful and only if they are very lucky. This is still America, even if many of us no longer recognize it. 

My point is expanding the definition of accountability so that failure in one area doesn’t seem like failure everywhere. Obviously, it would be better if Renee Nicole Good were alive, but in death, she might finally show people who didn’t believe it, or who were too focused on their wallets to believe it, that Trump truly is a evil man, and that other truly evil men are drawn to him.

Evil might be the most important thing to emerge from the video that Ross leaked to Alpha News. In it, Renee Nicole Good can be heard saying to him: "I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, after he shoots her in the face three times, Ross can be heard saying: “Fucking bitch.”