Deep sigh.
Here we go again, Y'all. Let the ritual begin...
Did she comply? Was the car moving? How fast? At what angle? She tried to hit him. No she didn't. Obey law enforcement. Don’t make sudden moves. Follow instructions and you’ll be fine.
Folks keep replaying fragments of information about the Minneapolis ICE shooting as if the correct combination of obedience and posture might retroactively render Renee Nicole Good alive.
This is the language Americans have learned to speak when the state kills somebody. People talk like survival is a puzzle you solve correctly. Like there some precise choreography you must do to survive.
Hands positioned like so. Speed calibrated just right. Tone sufficiently deferential.
Folks really believe all that reliably protects civilians from armed agents of the state. The questions are a way of pretending that the outcome was avoidable if only the victim had performed citizenship more perfectly.
If the killing can be explained as a failure of compliance, then everybody watching gets to feel safer. Folks can tell themselves, "I would have done it differently." "I would have known better." "This won’t happen to me." You don't know what the fuck you would have done. Just stop.
Because if you are confronted by sudden authority, masked hulking men, weapons, shouting, chaos, and fear, the brain does not access some well-rehearsed civic instruction manual. It does not flip to the page labeled perfect compliance. The brain switches to survival mode. The brain's job is to keep the body safe. And so It scans for ESCAPE. It floods the body with adrenaline. Time distorts. Sound narrows. Fine motor skills degrade. Judgment collapses into reflex. It tells your ass to RUN! This is basic biology.
People love to imagine themselves as calm, rational, obedient avatars in these scenarios because it flatters their sense of control. But the truth is destabilizing. Under threat, humans freeze, flinch, misinterpret, move too fast, move too slow, hesitate, comply imperfectly, comply inconsistently, comply while still being read as dangerous. The very things people insist would have saved her, things like stillness, clarity, precision, and compliance are often NEUROLOGICALLY INACCESSIBLE IN MOMENTS OF TERROR!
The brain’s job is not to perform obedience correctly. It is to keep the body alive by any means it can manage in the milliseconds available.
That’s why the compliance narrative is so fucking tired It demands superhuman composure from civilians while excusing split-second lethal decisions from armed agents trained for force. It treats fear as evidence of guilt and instinct as intent. And it pretends that survival is a skill issue rather than a power issue.
So when people say I would have done it differently, what they’re really saying is I need to believe the system is predictable. Because if you accept that a person can follow instructions and STILL BE KILLED, if you accept that panic is not controllable and obedience is not protective, then the ground gives way beneath you. Then safety stops being something you earn and starts being something that is arbitrarily granted, or denied, by the state.
The questions are not about Good's actions. They are about audience's fears and they are a collective incantation against vulnerability. Because admitting that somebody can follow the rules and still die at the hands of the state is intolerable for a society that insists its violence is rational and earned and deserved.
Stacey Patton
