The Shield of Certainty: Why Renee Good Didn’t See The Bullet Coming.

Two things I thought about after watching the clips of an ICE agent shooting and killing Renee Good in Minneapolis. 

The first is just because something is lawful doesn’t mean that it is good for you. “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive (1 Corinthians 10:23 NLT). In the eyes of the court, federal agents using lethal force is often justified by a checklist of “probable cause” factors, but that doesn’t make the outcome beneficial to a community, and it certainly doesn’t make it constructive for a society already fractured by distrust.

Secondly, Renee Good had no fear of those agents. You can see it in the tilt of her head, the steady grip on her steering wheel, and the lack of panic in her eyes until the very last second. She had no gut feeling that she would experience any violence from those agents, let alone an arrest. There was a fundamental assumption of safety—a shield of perceived invulnerability that allowed her to prioritize her own confusion over the frantic, shouted commands of federal agents.

Federal agents are rarely prosecuted for fatal shootings because the legal threshold is a low bar for them to clear. It is far too easy for an agent to claim they “perceived a threat” or had probable cause for their safety. This is exactly why the ICE agent who killed Good is not facing prosecution.

Regardless of the factors that suggest Good was not a lethal threat—the way she kept her hands visible, her lack of aggressive verbal posturing, and the way she turned her wheels sharply to the right with the clear intent of driving away from the agents rather than at them—the law treats the car itself as a deadly weapon. The moment those tires crunched against the asphalt, the legal machinery moved to protect the shooter, not the deceased.

I understand that Good was not following the orders to exit the vehicle. However, the situation was overly tense from the start. An agent shouting for Good to “get out of the fucking car.” Using that kind of language immediately escalates a situation from a professional encounter to a high-stakes confrontation. It triggers the amygdala, pushing a person into fight-or-flight mode. As we saw, Good’s instinct was flight. She wasn’t looking for a fight; she was looking for an exit.

Good wasn’t trying to be a “rebel” or a criminal. She was in a defensive mindset at a level she had likely never experienced before, and her brain directed her to seek safety. There is also a deeper, perhaps subconscious, calculation that happens in these moments. Her brain was likely telling her that if she fled, the agents would simply let her go or follow her in a low-speed pursuit. Why wouldn’t she think that? When is the last time we saw a white woman in a suburban setting fatally shot by federal agents for a traffic-related non-compliance?

Her behavior exists in a vacuum of privilege—the privilege of not knowing that a single mistake can be your last.

Good’s behavior was the complete opposite to the Black experience in America. Most Black people cannot imagine reacting the same way Good did. We have seen this scenario play out too many times, a Black person makes any sudden move and the next thing you know they are fatally shot.

While Good moved with a sense of confused indignation, Black drivers are often taught that any sudden movement, any sign of “flight,” is a death sentence.

In some situations, the Black person is even less of a threat than Good appeared to be. We remember Trayvon Martin, who was approached by George Zimmerman for simply walking home with a bag of Skittles and a juice. We remember the many names of people who were “reaching” for wallets or “looking” suspicious.

For Renee Good, the agents were a hurdle she thought she could navigate or bypass. For Black people, those same agents are often viewed as the arbiters of life and death. The tragedy of Renee Good is not just the loss of her life, but the realization that the “benefit of the doubt” she assumed she had didn’t exist in that moment—and for many of us, it has never existed at all.

If we return to the scripture, we must ask: how do we make our justice system constructive? If the law allows for the killing of an unarmed woman fleeing in a vehicle, and that law is deemed “sufficient,” then the law is failing the “beneficial” test.

True justice would require a shift from “can I shoot?” to “should I shoot?” It would require an acknowledgment that aggressive language and immediate escalation create the very “threats” agents later claim they were defending themselves against. Until we bridge the gap between what is “lawful” and what is actually “good,” we will continue to watch these clips, divided by our experiences but united by a mounting sense of tragedy.