U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO) is blaming Minneapolis resident Renee Good for her own death after she was shot in the head by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last week.
“It could have been prevented by her if she would have complied with the lawful orders of law enforcement,” Crank told KNUS radio host Jeff Hunt last week. “And that’s what this gets down to, simply the rule of law.”
Recordings of the shooting show that Good, who was protesting ICE activity in Minneapolis, was asked to get out of her car, but her decision to try to drive away instead did not necessarily give the ICE agent the right to shoot her, say experts.
A New York Times analysis of video of the event showed that Ross was not run over and appears to show he wasn’t hit.
“You have to put yourself in that police officer’s mind and position,” Crank, who represents Colorado Springs, continued on KNUS. “And, you know. He’d been run over once before, apparently, and dragged. But even so, he’s in a car, he’s given lawful orders, and this is a lady who is refusing them. They’ve been taunting them all day. They’re trying to get traffic going. They’re trying to protect their own safety as well. I mean, you have to take it in its totality and look at it and ask yourself, ‘What would you do?’ And you can’t put an unreasonable expectation on someone else that you wouldn’t put on yourself. And to me, we always have to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt. There are sometimes bad cops. There will be a full investigation of that shooting.”
The Department of Justice announced last week that it would not investigate Good’s death, and it will not turn over evidence to state investigators.
Vice President J.D. Vance made a similar comment to Crank’s after the shooting.
“A tragedy? Absolutely. But a tragedy that falls on this woman and all of the radicals who teach people that immigration is the one type of law that rioters are allowed to interfere with,” Vance wrote in a Jan. 8 tweet.
“The gaslighting is off the charts and I’m having none of it. This guy was doing his job,” Vance wrote. “She tried to stop him from doing his job. When he approached her car, she tried to hit him.”
It Gets Democrats “All Excited”
Also in the interview, Crank told radio host Hunt that Good’s shooting was a “terrible tragedy.”
“It’s disheartening, and it was a terrible tragedy what happened in Minneapolis with Ms. Good.,” said Crank on air.
“We’ll see the Democrats seem to want to make that their issue, and it energizes their base and gets people on their side of the aisle all excited, and that’s what they’re all about. It’s not about principle. It’s not about the rule of law for them. It’s about winning elections, and so that’s that’s sort of what they are trying to do.”
The Colorado Times Recorder asked Crank’s spokesperson via email if Crank thought it was fair to blame Good for her own death, even if she was asked to get out of her car, given that the ICE agent shot her after the agent almost certainly stepped away from the vehicle, and continued shooting after Good’s vehicle was moving away from him.
Crank’s office did not respond.
