As a kid, I remember how we would play superheroes and I would always avoid the idea that anyone, even bad guys, would be killed - I’d insist that adversaries would be knocked out or stunned. In Star Trek, I thought it was cool that security guards would always ‘set their phasers to stun’. Even then, the act of killing was an anathema to me.
I came to the USA in 1997, working as a postdoc in a neuroscience lab at the University of Southern California. A couple of years into this epoch of my life, I remember that the LAPD had shot a mentally-ill, elderly, homeless woman for lunging at them with a screwdriver (link).
It floored me.
An armed, competent, trained, equipped, uninjured copper couldn’t effectively defuse a physical altercation with a mentally ill homeless woman so they were forced to kill her? Unbelievable.
There was public outrage, a civil suit with a $1,000,000 payout but ultimately a police panel made the following ruling:
“Officer Larrigan’s response was defensive. It was reactive. It was his last, indeed his only, resort to prevent serious bodily injury or death to himself. And it was compelled in the end by the actions of the victim.” (link)
The language they use still makes no sense to me: “his only resort” suggesting that these guys had never heard of knife disarms. Fighting someone who is armed with a screwdriver is dangerous, but that is the job. If a cop’s only recourse to dealing with any violent or potentially violent member of the public is to pull out a firearm and to shoot (or threaten to shoot) that person, they’re a really lousy cop.
Now, naturally, I am not a police officer, have no real idea what these situations are really like and I was not there and have no idea what actually happened. But that's not the point.
The point of the discussion is not to quibble the specific details of individual instances of officer-involved killings (for which there are well established practices that usually ensure that police escape criminal liability for their actions), but the overall pattern. By way of contrast, in the United Kingdom, a grand total of 88 people have been directly killed since 1990 (link), whereas 1,315 people were killed in the USA in 2025 alone (link). Some prominent examples of individual cases that made the news are Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Daniel Shaver, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright, Ma'Khia Bryant, Adam Toledo, Sonya Massey, and (most recently) Renée Good.
Beyond the obvious barbarity of these numbers, how they beggar belief and challenge any notion of what should be considered 'normal' in a civilized society, to me this simply shows one thing - that consideration of the sanctity of life in the United States is treated differently by law enforcement officers than in other countries. I do not understand what the cause of this disparity is - the fact that the availability of guns in the USA makes the risk of being killed as a police officer at least 100 times worse than in the UK, systemic racism, other forms of violent discrimination, the existence of warrior culture within individual departments or subgroups, or even the long and storied history of romanticizing gun-use by lawmen in Westerns.
At some level, the reasons for the disparity don't matter.
What matters is that police officers in the US are more likely to think that it is somehow more acceptable to kill members of the public than in other countries. However justified or unjustified that action might be, it is chilling to contemplate and should be considered a serious problem that absolutely needs to be remedied.
Under the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent call for police reform, I felt that there was some hope that police activity would eventually center on preventing criminal activity and protecting public safety as long as reform and activism continued. Any accompanying civic issues of corruption, and racial prejudice could be dealt with. The system still felt dangerous, prejudiced, and unfair but still served the underlying need to enforce the law.
The recent political developments from MAGA, the over-funding of ICE, and subsequent behavior of the agency taking enforcement actions reveals a stark, horrific willingness of law enforcement officers to shoot people (link) and to conduct themselves in the most unprofessional, unlawful, and illegitimate way possible.
On October 4, 2025 in Chicago, a woman named Marimar Martinez was shot seven times by border patrol agents who were recorded as saying "Do Something Bitch" during the altercation, one of whom boasted about their marksmanship on their victim as a target to other members of their team (link, link). On January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, a woman called Renee Good was killed by a federal officer, who was recorded as saying "Fucking Bitch" after he shot her point blank through her car's side window (link). An unverified post on Instagram from January 11, 2026 shows an interview with a woman claiming to be an ex-marine brutalized by ICE agents saying "Have not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch" (link).
Other factors suggest deliberate brutality. The narrative from the MAGA leadership that routinely makes false claims about victims, absolves any federal agents actions under all circumstances and uses every pretense to intimidate political opponents suggest that the brutality is part of an intentional policy. Federal agents' wearing of masks to avoid identification and accountability is unprecedented (except possibly in South African death squads and ISIS fighters). The performative nature of many of the actions themselves and clear lack of concern for the well-being of the public is deliberately provocative.
The killing of Renée Good reminds me of the scene in Schindler's List when Diana Reiter, a jewish engineer, informs Amon Göth that the barracks in the Plaszów labor camp were built incorrectly and he has her shot saying "We're not going to argue with these people" (link). It is at that point where the audience understands Göth's attitude perfectly - he'd kill someone just for having the sheer gall to speak to him in a way he felt was disrespectful - and following the killing, the organization he is a part of both accepts and celebrates his action. At the risk of invoking the Reductio ad Hitlerum logical fallacy, the parallels seem pretty close to me.
This shows us where we are - what the obvious role that federal immigration actions are being used for.
Clearly, we must resist this entire process. We must insist on humanity. We must stand up for an end to the violence.
The people standing up and going to these places in order to provide accountability and resistance in the face of this onslaught are displaying a courage that I know I do not possess.
They are exhibiting Satyagraha - Gandhi's civil disobedience clinging steadfastly to the truth while resisting the barbarity of these killers - with incredible courage and heroism.
A single candle of grace in the current darkness and I thank and honor them.
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