Put Your Amygdala On Ice

I tried to beam some positive energy into the world on Wednesday with a video of Little Kitty reveling in a fresh feather attached to the wand. Having posted a clip to social media, I then headed out for an afternoon’s skiing, but when I later pulled up Facebook in the lodge I was, alas, greeted not by happy reactions to feline frivolity but rather a clip from CNN of ICE fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good. This perspective seemed fairly damning in certain regards, to a degree I found myself tempted to react immediately, but instead I put my amygdala in jail to cool down, resolving to allow more of the story to clarify before sharing a take.

What a delightful bright spot of seeming sanity we got from the Trump administration when border czar Tom Homan, while pressed in a CBS interview to offer his take, said it would be unprofessional to pre-judge the events before law enforcement professionals had time to analyze videos, interview witnesses, and debrief officers. Before the dawn of social media, we might have grown agitated by government officials saying “no comment”, but in today’s era of knee-jerk hot takes it feels weirdly refreshing.

Kristi Noem, however, went straight to assertions of “domestic terrorism”, and Trump predictably offered nuance-free support of ICE a day after cynically throwing Capitol Police under the J6 bus, while Minnesotan governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey went nuclear with their own counter-narrative. By later the same day aggrieved Minnesotans were pelting not ICE but local police with snowballs because that’s who was on hand to take the abuse.

By coincidence, the New York Times happened to be conducting an exclusive long-form interview with Trump in the oval office on Wednesday as events were unfolding, and they took the opportunity to press him on his take. A Trump aide brought out a laptop and showed a video that, from its angle and distance, lent itself to the impression that the involved car struck the ICE agent before he shot the occupant. The reporters then brought up a different video that offered a clearer perspective and, having seen it, Trump’s position seemed to soften. What better illustration could one want of our temptation to run with a story supported by cherry-picked evidence that confirms our existing biases?

By Thursday, alas, Homan began walking back his agnostic stance, now hewing closer to the party line. We might have expected this from someone whose 2024 apprehension during an FBI sting operation, in which he allegedly accepted a bag of cash in exchange for anticipated border enforcement contracts, was dismissed by the Trump-coopted DOJ of 2025. Loyalty trumps all with Trump and what better means to ensure loyalty than kompromat documented by the justice system which you now control? I infer that Tom briefly forgot who owned him only to quickly receive a brutal reminder.

Instead of stewing exclusively in toxic personalities and politics, though, let’s zoom out to consider the general phenomena in play. In the era of the social media fueled fire-hose of hyper-partisan rage we would do well to reflect on matters at the intersection of bitemporality and bandwidth.

In bitemporal modeling, one models events on two timelines, both “as it actually was” and “as it was recorded”, which reveals the latency of cognition. The finance industry considers such matters of paramount importance since back-testing a model against world events does not prove its usefulness if it fails to account for latency of awareness. What practical good does your one-week-hence model of, say, copper prices offer if the data required to compute it arrives a month thereafter?

On bandwidth, we are living in a world at once shaped by political strategists who have explicitly adopted a “flood the zone with shit” approach as well as turbo-charged by algorithms that profit from continual rage delivered in fifteen second sound bites. People hadn’t even returned to work after the holidays before the US had snatched Maduro out of Venezuela, we were still processing that when we found the hyper-politicized J6 anniversary upon us, and then the next day ICE kills Renee. Who among us has the brain cells left for The Epstein Files when from one day to the next we’re absorbing another event that in previous epochs would have consumed a year? Who will remember Renee when we invade Greenland?

Taken together, these concepts illustrate a situation wherein those holding the initiative are executing a highly effective Denial Of Service attack against rational analysis, to say nothing of strategy formation. People at every level find themselves stuck in a loop of reacting to events before clarity is possible and then having their focus dragged forward to the next crisis. At the time of analysis, only hazy and patchy data exists, and by the time shrewd judgment becomes possible everyone is on to the next thing.

Anybody who has developed a modicum of competence at a computer game in the Real Time Strategy genre understands the value of knocking an opponent off balance and the horror of finding oneself on the receiving end. The mediocre player, having practiced their preferred build order and combat tactics in contrived contexts, often collapses into ineffectual reactivity as the slightest perturbation of their careful plans under real-world conditions fragments attention and disrupts intention. The expert, meanwhile, expects such chaos and manages by keeping plans fluid while ruthlessly multi-tasking between the stories they are managing at multiple timescales. Perhaps most of Trump’s opposition played too little StarCraft in college to deal effectively with his continual incursions into their OODA loops. I wonder if Gavin Newsom has of late been practicing as Terran, Protoss, or Zerg.

I was recently quite impressed on multiple levels by a two-part piece titled “Not A Peaceful Protest” that NPR put out under their “Trump’s Terms” podcast. The amount of research effort and production quality is matched only by the timing of its drop just days before the first J6 anniversary to occur under a Trump presidency. They have not only been playing the long game by tirelessly developing a massive catalog of evidence that tells a powerful story but also timed the synthesis bombshell exquisitely. People of all stripes who want to bring sanity back to US politics should take notice. People who authentically “back the blue” must not look away.

So let’s try to be grown-ups about the most recent tragedy and ponder what we can figure out at multiple scopes and timescales while being realistic about what is seen, unseen, and unseeable.

As full disclosure, my top-line synthesis immediately after watching just the one CNN-shared video mentioned earlier distilled to the legal term “officer-created jeopardy”.

Was Renee guilty of “failure to obey”? Yes, absolutely. Was she involved in some manner of unlawful activity immediately prior to the event? I don’t think anyone is clear on that point — I have heard that she was acting solely as a “legal observer” though over the past year I have seen many incidents of that spilling into unlawful interference. Was she trying to hit the officer? I don’t think so and yet she did also endanger him and other officers on a very compressed timeline. Renee behaved regrettably, yes, but to the extent that we can observe she also did so in a predictably human way given the stress, ambiguity, and pacing of events, and didn’t deserve to die.

What first struck me about the situation involved the aggressive manner in which an officer engaged Renee’s vehicle from the left side — shouting “get out of the fucking car”, grabbing the door handle, and reaching inside the cabin while the vehicle was on and in gear, sticking with that failing approach as the vehicle rolled and the situation rapidly spiraled out of control in a manner that could have caused many more people, officers and civilians alike, to be struck by stray bullets and a careening car. This flies in the face of doctrine that stipulates an officer should calmly provide clear and sequential instructions that incrementally de-escalate, e.g. by starting with something as simple as “turn off the vehicle”.

I also wondered why, if they had decided to make an arrest, ICE did not elect to employ containment tactics, doing so by boxing in the vehicle with one or more of their own many on-scene vehicles, thereby collapsing the cone of possibilities. Cars become dramatically less capable when deprived of the ability to build momentum.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the officer who shot Renee appears in front of the hood, just as she puts the car into drive. To my eye she is turning the wheel to avoid the officer, and yet also puts in gas before she finishes turning it, possibly creating the false perception that she is trying to hit the officer, when the nuanced reality may be that she was maintaining a recklessly narrow margin in a tense moment. The instant her wheels begin to spin forward the gun comes out, the officer puts one round through the windshield, and before the car speeds away appears to put two more through the open driver window, after which the vehicle rockets away before slamming into another parked car.

Sometime later another video came out showing the shooting officer coming around the vehicle from behind and placing himself in front of it. As someone who won’t even walk between parked cars when an engine is running this struck me as an extremely hazard manufacturing thing to do in such a tense and escalating situation. He deliberately created the peril from which he so violently extricated himself just moments later when only seconds earlier the worst possible outcome seemed to be someone low key fleeing a scene after failing to obey officer instructions, a situation that could later have been remedied with a low pressure arrest after running the vehicle’s plates.

And now, just as I am doing a final editorial pass on this piece, as if to make the bitemporality problem really on the nose, yet another video drops, this time the footage taken by the shooting officer on his cell phone as he walks a couple of circuits around the vehicle, arriving at the front of the vehicle just as the situation goes sideways almost unbelievably fast, triggered by the uncoordinated arrival of other officers.

From this latest clip it seems like the wheels were pointing slightly to the left and the officer standing just to the left edge of the vehicle as Renee puts in the gas and spins the wheels right simultaneously. I’m also struck by the surreal parallel to “texting while driving” in the form of “vlogging while shooting” — the officer filming with a hand-held phone instead of a proper body-cam which doubtless served as distraction from operational readiness and situational judgment, stemming from a mixture of equipment inadequacy and civilian harassment.

And, if all that weren’t enough, there is the woman who appears to have been Renee’s would-be passenger first getting in the officer’s face and then trying to enter the vehicle just before it speeds away. Meanwhile perhaps Renee wasn’t even looking at the person who would kill her, driving by touch while focused on the officer trying to forcibly enter her car, possibly even unwittingly hitting her friend along the way.

Every decision made by the officers in the scant few seconds between initiation and tragedy seemed to ratchet up the pressure while simultaneously expanding the cone of chaos and compressing the timeline. It’s not for nothing that the legal system has conceptualized “officer-created jeopardy” and that the written policy of law enforcement agencies strives to keep officers and civilians alike out of these situations proactively. By the time the gun came out and the outcome hung on decisions made within hundreds of milliseconds, the die had largely been cast, and all parties were running off their amygdalas.

Apportioning blame to an individual on the basis of what we can observe in a discrete event feels neat and satisfying while ultimately proving intellectually dishonest, a point driven home for me during a two-week “Human Factors Engineering” short-course at the University Of Michigan some seventeen years ago. Zooming out, we see a massive funnel that includes lax immigration enforcement under the Biden administration culminating in a multi-million case backlog in the immigration court system followed by Trump proclaiming that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” while directing ICE to adopt increasingly aggressive tactics to meet deportation quotas, cynically activating the National Guard to troll political opponents, and flooding official government social media accounts with brazenly incendiary and partisan rhetoric (RIP Hatch Act). In light of that mounting chaos the only surprising thing is that ICE didn’t kill a US citizen sooner.

The US has long striven to maintain a firewall between military and police operations, recognizing that each involves a distinct skill set, and knowing that heavy-handed domestic operations have a way of spiraling out of control. The best police officer looks like a hybrid of sleuth, soldier, and social worker, and knows how best to draw on each persona in a given moment, seeking more to defuse than destroy. Our Army, meanwhile, trains for a very different job, a reality made abundantly clear when it has pivoted from the punctuated “shock and awe” of regime decapitation to the years-long slog of occupation (hello Venezuela). We abandon this principle at our peril while Trump gleefully plays a game where “chaos is a ladder”.

We all feel the pull of armchair quarterbacking and motivated reasoning. We all need thus to curb our enthusiasm for the quick dopamine hits of partisan narratives pushed by cynical politicians, profiteering media, and parasitic influencers. At the macro scale we see tectonic forces that feel inexorable. At the micro scale we see events that feel pre-ordained, in generalities if not in detail. We are thus stuck trying to make a difference somewhere in the middle.

Has ICE rushed hiring in a way that sacrifices vetting and training? Yeah, probably. Did this happen with the backdrop of historical neglect of staffing and mission? Sure did. Are multiple classes of bad actors pouring gasoline on the fire from all sides? Most definitely.

Were the actual officers involved in Renee’s death poorly vetted and trained? Here I don’t actually know. Had they been awake for 72 hours during some heedless operations surge while protesters harangued them such that fatigue and frustration overrode their training and decency? Maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe a little from columns A, B, C, and D. I know I’m more prone to looking incompetent or cruel when I’ve been metaphorically mortared for months on end and haven’t slept properly in longer than I can remember. I also know that some people, however, are just assholes on their best day. And yet some of those “assholes” are also dealing with unprocessed trauma — I have in fact heard unconfirmed rumors that the shooting officer was earlier involved in a dragging event for which this moment could have been triggering.

Was Renee frazzled from seeing her local community terrorized by ongoing military style operations? I would imagine so. Was she scrupulously limiting her activities to that of “legal observer” or spilling into unlawful interference? I don’t know. Was there some larger local context in which all this happened but that is uncaptured by videos. Yes, definitionally. Did she make poor decisions in her last moment under extreme stress and a needlessly compressed timeline? Yes. Was she engaged in “domestic terrorism” and did she get what she deserved? Absolutely fucking not.

Are we blundering our way toward a civil war under a regime salivating at the prospect of using escalating chaos to justify cynically exploiting our military and law enforcement communities alike to effect brutal crackdowns that could enable the compromise of an election? I don’t live inside Trump’s head but it certainly feels that way from where I am sitting. So keep your head screwed on straight, stay aware of the long arc through time, and imagine what a better world looks like instead just reacting to the one you inhabit now. Your individual choices cascade and thus matter.