DAVID MARCUS: ICE protesters put lives at risk, and not just theirs
The buzz around Hollywood is that the new film "One Battle After Another," which features left-wing vigilantes triumphing over the evil American government, is set up to win a Best Picture Oscar.
In Minneapolis Wednesday, we saw what happens when this silver screen fantasy meets the bloody reality of the actual world, where, during an altercation with ICE agents, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed.
Over the past day, various videos of the confrontation have been scrutinized as if they were the Zapruder film. What seems clear is that an officer was struck by Good’s car as she attempted to flee the scene, and he shot her through the driver's side window.
What is less clear, at least to the critics of law enforcement, mainly on the left, is whether the officer in question could have used less deadly means in the situation. But the thorniness of that very issue is precisely why the anti-cop vigilante tactics used by Good are a terrible and deadly idea.
In the leftist world of protesting, there are two basic methods. The first is known as indirect action, such as holding a sign, chanting or marching along a sanctioned route. The other method is direct action, which is basically anything that might get you arrested.
According to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Good, along with others, including her wife, had spent the day impeding ICE officers who were doing their legal job.
The purpose of Good and her comrades was to create confrontation with law enforcement, and that is exactly what happened.
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Nobody will ever know if Good intended to hit the officer with her car, or just panicked trying to get away. While it may feel viscerally like her death was too high a price to pay, these are the wages of direct action vigilantism.
The problem for cops is that the use of vehicles as weapons against them has skyrocketed in recent years, along with flat-out ambush attacks on them such as occurred in Dallas in September. Their threat level has never been higher.
When Good uses her car to block in law enforcement’s vehicle, the first thought of the officers isn’t "How do I de-escalate this?" It is "Are we being pinned down so people can shoot at us."
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The mantra of many on the left, including Antifa, whose tactics Good was employing, is "resistance by any means necessary." And if that puts lives at risk by shutting down streets so ambulances can’t move, or by driving at a cop, so be it, according to these radicals.
In fact, it is these agitators and the local police departments in places like Minneapolis and Portland who won’t arrest them, that create the very circumstances that lead to deadly confrontation. And they do it on purpose.
To take it a step further, the unwillingness of these police forces to punish direct action protesting has sent a clear message to the Antifa types that the streets belong to them. That is not how ICE officers operate, nor should it be.
I’ll be blunt, if the feckless manchild mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, actually allowed his police to arrest people for criminal protesting, this tragedy never would have happened.
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Further, if Democratic mayors and governors simply cooperated with ICE and handed over criminals instead of protecting them, these ICE officers would never have even been there in the first place.
Left-wing protesters have to understand that it is not the job of law enforcement to allow them to commit crimes just because they think their cause is just. After all, pretty much everyone thinks their cause is just.
The message today should be crystal clear, and sung in unison: Protesters need to stop their illegal efforts to impede federal agents. That isn’t protest. It is criminal behavior and as we saw, it gets people killed.
When Hollywood makes movies like "One Battle After Another" and celebrates anti-government violence, its "brave" stars like Leonardo DiCaprio don’t get shot, they get rich, they might even get Academy Awards, but that is because the movies are not real life.
In real life, anti-cop vigilante violence does get people killed, and sadly, though predictably, given the coddling of the criminals, that is exactly what happened in Minneapolis.