The Minneapolis ICE Shooting: Put Your Thinking Cap On
The shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis is generating enormous heat. Predictably, most of the conversation is driven by tribalism, politics, or emotion.
This event was 100% predictable after we had witnessed rising violence and the use of vehicles to obstruct agents, with shots fired, and people already wounded and killed. See my earlier article after the first attacks on ICE here:
"CORDIS DIE:" FACTIONS AND FEAR
You’re at a restaurant with your family, sitting next to some ICE or Border Patrol agents, or maybe you’re at a gas station near an ICE facility, or you notice an immigration sweep nearby. Do you just go about your business, hoping you’re immune to the potential violence, or do you take threat-proofing seriously and make that 1% effort to protect yourse…
I’m asking you to do something different.
Instead of reacting, I want you to examine this incident through the lens of physics and human factors—from the officer’s perspective at the moment force is used.
Human Reaction Time: Starting and Stopping
Most people don’t understand that reaction time works in both directions. It takes time to perceive a threat and initiate a response. But it also takes time to stop a response once it’s started.
Studies show the average reaction time to a simple stimulus is around 0.25 seconds. But that’s under ideal conditions in a lab—not on a snowy street with a vehicle accelerating toward you. Complex decision-making under stress takes longer. And once you’ve committed to pressing a trigger, there’s a lag before your brain can send the signal to stop, your body processes that signal, and your finger actually ceases its action.
Shots fired after a threat has passed aren’t necessarily evidence of malice—they may be evidence of basic human physiology.
Limited Attention: You Can’t See Everything
Human attention is finite and selective. Under stress, it narrows further—a phenomenon known as perceptual tunneling. We simply cannot see and process everything that is happening. Our short-term memory capacity is limited, and we can visually track only a few objects at a time. At times, our focus on the threat is so complete that even things that would be clearly in front of us on video are never even recognized. Check out the “Invisible Gorilla” on YouTube if you want a dose of that reality.
Armchair quarterbacks watching video footage can pause, rewind, and zoom in on details like the exact angle of the tires, the precise position of other officers, and the vehicle’s speed. Of course, their perspective today often goes through an emotional and tribal filter, altering the very facts they see, just like stress alters what we see. They can analyze frame by frame, with the benefit of hindsight, rewind, slow motion, and zoom in.
An officer in the moment cannot. He’s processing movement, sound, shouted commands, potential threats to himself and others—all in fractions of a second. He doesn’t have the luxury of freeze-frame analysis. The question isn’t “what does the video show?” The question is “what did the officer reasonably perceive in real time?”
Stick or Snake: The Survival Response
Here’s a principle you need to understand: in survival situations, humans don’t have time to verify—they react to patterns.
If you’re walking through tall grass and see a curved shape on the ground, you jump first and determine whether it’s a stick or a snake second. That’s not a flaw. That’s millions of years of evolution keeping you alive. The cost of assuming “stick” when it’s actually a snake is death. The cost of assuming “snake” when it’s actually a stick is a momentary spike of adrenaline.
Officers confronting a vehicle moving toward them are operating on this same survival wiring. The brain is screaming “threat” and initiating a response before the conscious mind can complete a full analysis. The legal and tactical question is whether that perception was reasonable given the circumstances—not whether it was correct in hindsight.
What Factors Are You Weighing?
I want you to engage your high brain here—not your tribal brain.
Consider:
Limits of human perception
Limits of human reaction time
Limits of human performance in situations that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving
What factors are you weighing in your assessment? Drop them in the comments below.
I’ll be adding comments with specific data points as I continue to review the available footage and information.
Thinking hat required.
Stay safe.
Be reasonable and rational; others won’t.
Trevor
