Fear and Loathing in Minneapolis

Minneapolis is watching the machine do what it always does after it kills: it tightens its tie, straightens the paperwork, and tries to make the blood look like “process.” And in the last five days the pattern has become unmistakable.

First, they pushed new video into the bloodstream of the news cycle—an administration-approved angle, conveniently framed as the great exonerator. 

But when grown-ups with stopwatches and professional skepticism got their hands on the visuals, the story didn’t magically become clean. Reuters’ reconstruction points to a grim, almost clinical detail: the officer’s first shots came as the vehicle was moving past him. 

That’s not a verdict. It’s something worse for the people selling “obvious self-defense” as gospel: it’s doubt you can measure.

Then came the institutional tell—the part where the state’s credibility is dragged behind a truck because it’s inconvenient.

Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the outfit locals expect to investigate deadly force with at least some baseline public legitimacy, says it was cut off from evidence and interviews—effectively pushed out—when the federal apparatus decided the FBI would run the whole show. PBS and CBS local reporting, along with official statements, describe a reversal that left the BCA unable to meet its standards or the public’s expectations. 

Translation: the people who fired the shots get to manage the room where the facts are sorted.

And when career lawyers inside the Justice Department’s civil-rights machinery reportedly offered to dig in—do the hard work, run down the facts, test the claim of justification—they were told, in essence, No, thank you. CBS reports the Civil Rights Division prosecutors were told they would not play a role. Then the resignations started stacking up like a flare gun going off in the fog.

That’s not “normal.” That’s a system coughing smoke.

Renee Good’s family—left to stand in the crater—has now hired Romanucci & Blandin, the same firm known for representing George Floyd’s family, to investigate and publish findings because the official channels have not inspired confidence. When a family has to rent its own truth because the government won’t reliably provide it, the legitimacy meter is already pinned in the red.

Meanwhile, the city is trapped in the cruel logic of escalation. A second incident: a federal officer shoots another person in Minneapolis, this time reported as a man wounded in the leg amid a disputed encounter. And the response from the top isn’t humility, transparency, restraint—it’s the old authoritarian jukebox selection: threaten the Insurrection Act, hint at troops, dare the city to flinch. AP and Reuters both report the President floating that option as unrest spreads.

At the state and city level, Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul have gone to federal court trying to halt the DHS/ICE surge, arguing the deployment is unlawful and dangerous. Even the existence of that lawsuit is an indictment: it says local government has concluded the federal presence is not merely controversial but structurally destabilizing.

And in Washington, Democrats have responded with an impeachment salvo against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem—symbolic in a divided Congress, perhaps, but politically diagnostic: people in power are now publicly treating DHS not as a normal agency managing a hard problem, but as a machine that has slipped its restraints.

So here is the updated reality, stripped of euphemism:

• We have a killing still argued as “self-defense,” but increasingly litigated in public through video analysis and contested investigative control. 

• We have state investigators sidelined, civil-rights prosecutors reportedly shut out, and resignations that read like a warning flare from inside the hull. 

• We have another shooting, more street tension, and a White House response that leans toward force and threats, not accountability. 

• And we have a community and state leadership trying—through courts, through counsel, through public pressure—to keep Minneapolis from becoming a live-fire demonstration of federal impunity. 

If the federal government wants trust, it knows the price: independent access, full disclosure, and an investigation that doesn’t look like the suspect running the lab. What it’s offering instead—more secrecy, more spin, more muscle—is not reassurance.

It’s a posture.

And Minneapolis, painfully experienced, recognizes it on sight.