An ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. He shot her in the head while she was inside her car. She was 37 years old, and a mother of three.
Those facts are fixed. Also fixed: the video footage from multiple cameras, including the ICE agent’s own cell phone camera, which quickly provided politicians, law enforcement and the public with multiple angles of the scene before, during and after the deadly encounter. Trump administration officials are demanding that the public accept that Good “weaponized” her vehicle, that the shooting was “self-defense” and that questioning this version of events endangers law enforcement.
Although an FBI probe is ongoing, the Justice Department has already said it does not believe there is currently any basis to open a criminal civil rights investigation into Good’s killing. This is a deeply unsettling and exasperating moment for those of us who care about police accountability, truth and justice. We have been here before with the police killings of Eric Garner, Philando Castile and George Floyd — and the many lesser-known killings also caught on camera. We have seen clear video, watched it again and again, and still justice is delayed or never comes.
This is a deeply unsettling and exasperating moment for those of us who care about police accountability, truth and justice.
After all of this, it’s easy to conclude that filming doesn’t matter. I don’t believe that. I’ve seen what happens when video exists, and I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. More often than not, it feels like video is the only thing standing between a lie and a life being ruined by it. And the government seems to know it. Just a few days ago, a government lawyer in Minnesota federal court proposed the radical argument that observing police is not protected by the Constitution.
Years ago, when I was a public defender in Brooklyn, I represented a man named Pedro Barbosa. There was no cell phone video in his case, and nothing that went viral. The footage that saved him came from a surveillance camera at a nearby gas station that we were lucky enough to find, and that luck made the difference between freedom and prison.
A police officer claimed Pedro tried to run him over with his car. He told a detailed story under oath that he had approached Pedro’s car to ask for license and registration and then Pedro had made eye contact and accelerated straight toward him, forcing the officer to make a last-second, heroic leap out of the path of the speeding car. Based on that testimony, Pedro was charged with a violent felony and faced up to 15 years in prison. He was detained before his trial on Rikers Island because he could not afford bail.
I remember sitting across from Pedro in the interview cells behind the courtroom the day after his arrest. He was terrified but firm. None of it was true. He hadn’t tried to hit anyone. He pulled out of a parking spot and drove away — that was it. He kept asking the same question I had heard so many times before: “Who’s going to believe me over the police?”
Thankfully, an investigator from my office found surveillance footage from a nearby business. The video — far more distant and grainy than what we have seen in Minneapolis, but clear nonetheless — showed the officer was never in danger. Pedro never accelerated toward him and the officer was to the side of the vehicle. The officer wasn’t afraid — he was angry at the gall of a man pulling away from him. He did not kill Pedro. But he did something that could have destroyed his life: he accused him of a violent felony that would have buried him in prison.
The question arose: Should I share this video with the prosecution? I had irrefutable evidence of police perjury that could set my client free, yet lawyers in my office were divided. We had all experienced the frustration of a prosecutor calling us back after seeing clear evidence of a police lie in paperwork or video, and offering an alternative reality of what they claimed they saw. An often-blind benefit of the doubt given to police despite what their eyes told them. Maybe it was idealistic, but I couldn’t imagine anyone – even the office prosecuting my client – disagreeing with what I was plainly seeing here.
I’m glad I shared the video that time. The prosecutor did not simply drop the charges. After seeing the video, he indicted the officer for perjury. The officer was ultimately convicted and sentenced.
That outcome was extraordinary — not because the evidence was unclear, but because accountability happened at all. It required video, investigative capacity, and a prosecutor willing to act on what the evidence showed. Without that footage, Pedro almost certainly would have gone to prison on a lie the system is primed to accept: a car as a weapon, an officer as the victim.
Pedro Barbosa’s case does not prove that the system works. Far from it. It proves something narrower: that when video exists, and when it is impossible to ignore, accountability becomes possible. Pedro Barbosa’s case does not prove that the system works. Far from it. It proves something narrower: that when video exists, and when it is impossible to ignore, accountability becomes possible. Renée Nicole Good’s case may end this way. We do not yet know whether the truth so plainly visible will ultimately be accepted, acted on, or buried beneath official narratives and threats meant to silence dissent. Indeed, in an era of heightened political control over law enforcement priorities — underscored by the recent resignations of career federal prosecutors who protested the Trump Justice Department’s directive to pivot the Minneapolis ICE shooting inquiry toward the victim’s family rather than pursue a civil rights investigation — even the most compelling video evidence does not by itself guarantee accountability. Yet that uncertainty is precisely why this moment demands not less video, but more. In a world where misinformation spreads faster than facts, and where artificial intelligence is increasingly used to manufacture doubt, flooding the public sphere with real footage — captured by real people, in real time — is one of the most powerful ways to combat the lies our government amplifies to justify state violence and repression. I am sure that the Trump administration will continue to deny the cruelty of ICE aggression and mass deportations, but first-hand videos of this cruelty will make this denial more difficult, more costly, and more exposed. This is why I have spent years urging people to document ICE and police activity safely and lawfully. Why I helped create know-your-rights videos for immigrants and bystanders. Why I have said, over and over, that filming and documenting ICE and other law enforcement activities and arrests is the most American thing you can do. It is the pinnacle of First Amendment-protected action, no matter what the DOJ tries to tell us. And it is needed now more than ever. The violence isn’t abating, but escalating. The day after Renée Nicole was killed, Customs and Border Protection agents in Portland shot and wounded two people — again involving vehicles, just like every ICE shooting since September. Meanwhile, even other law-enforcement agencies seeking the truth have been shut out: Minnesota state police and prosecutors have said the FBI has taken sole control of the Good investigation and is refusing to share information, as the administration announces it will send hundreds more federal officers into the state. What makes this moment especially dangerous is not just the killing, but the coordinated effort from the highest levels of power to condition the public to disbelieve what we can plainly see — and how eagerly many comply. The only answer is to continue to insist on the truth, and saturate the public sphere with it. We have the tools. Let’s use them even more.
Scott Hechinger is an American civil rights attorney, former public defender, and the founder and executive director of Zealous, a nonprofit organization that supports historically overlooked experts leverage media, technology, and storytelling to shift public notions of health and safety. He is also an appointed lecturer at Columbia Law School, the University of San Francisco School of Law, and the University of Chicago Law School. 
