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Frank Figliuzzi is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. Subscribe to his Substack.
Illustration by Riley Levine
For a period of my 25-year FBI career, I led agent involved shooting inquiries. And as Chief Inspector, I made the tough calls as to whether those incidents complied with the Bureau’s deadly force policy.
That’s why I’m saying that Renee Good, the people of Minneapolis, dedicated cops, and all Americans deserve better than the investigation we’re getting. ICE and other DHS agents will continue to shoot people – and in fact, two more people were shot and injured in Portland the day after Good was killed. And the federal government will continue to pretend it’s objectively investigating, unless we demand otherwise.
Someone was shot. That’s about the only thing the investigation of an ICE agent’s deadly shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good in Minneapolis last Wednesday has in common with proper shooting inquiries. The purpose of a shooting review is simple, regardless of how complicated the incident may be. Reviewers are tasked with determining whether the shooter acted within agency policy based on a reasonable agent’s fear of imminent death or serious bodily harm to themselves or to another. Yet someone has decided the FBI, the agency leading the inquiry, should go well beyond that in ways that point to an illegitimate inquiry.
First, we’ve learned the FBI is also delving into Good’s history of exercising her constitutionally protected rights as an ICE monitor or activist. If that isn’t already outside the scope of a proper shooting review, an even more wildly inappropriate revelation surfaced on Tuesday that the FBI is also investigating Good’s widow.
If you think I’m exaggerating the degree to which an investigation of a victim’s widow is detached from the limited scope of a shooting inquiry, just look at what six federal prosecutors associated with the case did on Tuesday to protest this. They resigned...
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