Getting justice for Renee Nicole Good won't be easy — but it can happen

There’s something we need to talk about before talking about anything else related to Renee Nicole Good’s murder.

The likelihood of convicting her killer is very low.

No matter how damning you may think the video evidence is – and it is 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, they paint a picture of the difficulty of bringing him 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 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, 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 home of Jonathan Ross, in greater Minneapolis, and removing stuff. Fourth, the US Department of Homeland Security has “shadow units” dedicated to destroying evidence of crimes committed by immigration officials.

That’s on top of relentless and malicious lying. As Stephen Colbert said, the message is only the administration has the authority to determine the truth. Well, it’s also going to try making sure there’s no 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 released to Alpha News. (See above.) Apparently, Ross believed it would show that he was forced to kill Good in self-defense. What it actually 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 set this crime wave in motion.

That doesn’t mean good people shouldn’t try. Local prosecutors, though at a disadvantage without the aid and cooperation of the FBI, still opened an inquiry 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 Secretary Kristi Noem. (Hakeem Jeffries called her “a stone-cold liar.” He did not endorse impeachment, but notably did not rule it out.) Others have raised the question of whether they’ll vote to fund 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.

That won’t be 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.

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 are 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 believes is the true meaning of law and order: Comply or die.

Indeed, ICE officers appear to believe altogether that that’s the lesson it was teaching the American people with the murder of Renee Nicole Good – we can do whatever we want, to whomever we want, and the moment you object, we can deem you a criminal who’s deserving of whatever punishment we deem appropriate at that moment.

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

“Have you not learned?”

(Then he grabs the woman’s phone.)

My point here is not to be cynical of the likelihood of Ross seeing justice. That could happen, but only if state prosecutors are careful and only if they are lucky. This is still America, even if many of us no longer recognize it.

My point is expanding the idea 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 were focused on their wallets, that Trump is an evil man, and that other 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: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, after he shoots her in the face three times, Ross can be heard saying: “F------ B----.”